Programming blind spot.

[Almo]

Here's my advice:

Choose a project to program. Preferably something incredibly simple. I recommend Tic-Tac-Toe, two-player with a GUI in Visual Basic. You'll have a "New Game" and a "Quit" menu item. 9 buttons for the board, and a little code to determine if someone has won, or if the game is over.

Once you do that, then you branch out. Like add an AI who moves randomly. Learn about arrays and try to program two-player Othello; its rules are simple, and the moves are simple.

 

[jimlintott]

Here's my advice:

Choose a project to program. Preferably something incredibly simple. I recommend Tic-Tac-Toe, two-player with a GUI in Visual Basic. You'll have a "New Game" and a "Quit" menu item. 9 buttons for the board, and a little code to determine if someone has won, or if the game is over.

Once you do that, then you branch out. Like add an AI who moves randomly. Learn about arrays and try to program two-player Othello; its rules are simple, and the moves are simple.

That's pretty good advice. I remember when I had finished the C tutorial that I wrote a Mankala game. It was just a playing board for two but it kept score and wouldn't allow cheating. While doing it I learned that I needed a debugger to help figure out what was wrong, (Uninitialized variables in C can have some strange values), and that without comments there is a very good chance you will not be able to read your own code.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

You could also write a Sudoka solver, so you don't have to solve the tedious things by hand.

~~ Paul

 

[a_unique_person]

And just so you know 60% of all programmers are not very good at it. This is an observation I've made over 20+ years of writing software, working in all kinds of companies from Fortune 100 to small start-ups to dealing with outsource "talent".

As a member of that 60%, I would just like to point out that 30% are not good, 30% are competent, 30% are very good, and 10% are gifted.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

It all comes down to boundary cases. If you can make yourself think about the boundary cases, everything else falls into place.

It's boundary cases, I tell you!

~~ Paul

 

[a_unique_person]

That's the good thing about using a query to get your data, boundary cases, and picket fences, don't exist anymore.

"For each gooba in foo, where blart is less than 10, perform qwerty."

 

[kevin]

Pick a task you do frequently. Write down the steps you do to accomplish it. Program it. Don't assume the program will be done in time for the next time you have to do the task, so the "program it" step will be long.

For example one task I had to do frequently as a Windows sys admin was to create a spreadsheet of all members of a security group or mail group, including members from nested groups

I wrote down what I thought a program might need to do to accomplish that: connect to AD, lookup information in AD, recurse through AD, open a file, write to a file, close a file. Etc....

Then I learned how to do each of the tasks writing many little programs that did just a few parts at a time. Eventually I assembled all the pieces into a working program.

If you're a windows sys admin I would start with vbscript because it is available on most machines. And microsoft has tons of example code on doing most of this stuff.

 

[SpeederA]

I can't stress enough that you should stay away from VBA. Not only will you learn plenty of bad habits, in an inferior scripting language, most of what you learn will soon be useless as Microsoft is deprecating it in the near future.

I like the idea of PowerShell for sysadmin stuff but you might want to hold off on that until it's gone gold. VB.Net 2005 Express will probably be a good starter point for you. It's free, fairly powerful, and has a ridiculous number of snippets and sample projects available and you'll have no problem hacking together PowerShell scripts after you learn the basics of programming.

 

[imagineNoReligion]

And just so you know 60% of all programmers are not very good at it. This is an observation I've made over 20+ years of writing software, working in all kinds of companies from Fortune 100 to small start-ups to dealing with outsource "talent".

I would say it's more like %80.
heh, but %78.645 of all statistics are made up.

I don't know what the actual statistic would be, but when I worked as a consultant for IBM, I traveled to many different customer sites and it surprised me just how many programmers knew little beyond copy and paste.

That was 10 years ago though, perhaps things have improved since then. I've been rather isolated with my current position all these years, to have any feel for it.

 

[SpeederA]

And just so you know 60% of all programmers are not very good at it. This is an observation I've made over 20+ years of writing software, working in all kinds of companies from Fortune 100 to small start-ups to dealing with outsource "talent".

I don't know what the actual statistic would be, but when I worked as a consultant for IBM, I traveled to many different customer sites and it surprised me just how many programmers knew little beyond copy and paste.

That was 10 years ago though, perhaps things have improved since then. I've been rather isolated with my current position all these years, to have any feel for it.

It hasn't......

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

That was 10 years ago though, perhaps things have improved since then. I've been rather isolated with my current position all these years, to have any feel for it.

No, things have gotten worse. Back in my day, we knew how to program. Then kids stopped learning assembly language and everything went to hell, by cracky!

~~ Paul

 

[SpeederA]

It went more like this....

"Holy Crap! It's the year 1999 and everyone is throwing money at you if you just say the word 'Internet'. I gotta quit my job as a fry assistant and gemme some o' that!"

 

[Oleron]

Sorry about being a little slow on the replies but my sysadmin job is starting to take some downright liberties with my free time, causing me to neglect my internet posting. It is also cutting into the time I have for following up these excellent suggestions.

Rest assured though, I have taken on board the advice here and am following it up when I get the opportunity.
Cheers,
Oleron.