After four years of writing here and 29 years programming I remain convinced that the best way to learn a new language is by writing an application or converting an existing one, assuming it's not your first programming language. If it is your first language think of a simple task to program then try and implement it. Here are some ideas but your suggestions for first programming project are welcome. Please send me your ideas and I'll create a page for them. Specify which languages if they're specific.
- Input 3 numbers and calculate the average and output it.
- Create an array of random numbers. Save it to disk in a text file.
- Create a class (C++/C#) to calculate stats (min, max, average) of an array passed to it.
Plus and this is a personal rule; if I write a line or a block of code, I want to see it execute in a debugger. At least once to give me the confidence that it works. It's less important if you're writing it at home than say at work but all the tutorial code is always extensively by me. I's hard enough learning and if the code has bugs, harder still!
Talking of which apologies for anyone currently trying to follow tutorial listings. The download code is fine but many of the listings are messed up because the line breaks were removed. Once I republish them they will be ok. It's a few hundred pages so will take a few evenings to do. Ironically it was a programmer who either didn't test his conversion code 100% or didn't realize it had to keep line breaks in code listings. I hope he read yesterday's post and now you know why I care about line breaks!