Re: Programming mentor

From: Howard Kaikow (kaikow_at_standards.com)
Date: 03/12/04 

Date: Fri, 12 Mar 2004 11:05:46 -0500

I was the one who mentioned the King book. I have the book. It is at least
as good as its reputation.

At the risk of starting a discourse about MSFT bashing.

The best way to learn how to program may be to use one of MSFT's "visual"
products as that eliminates a lot of the crappy details in programming.

VS .NET offers several languages, including C/C++, C#, Visual Basic, and
something resembling Java. 

-- 
http://www.standards.com/; See Howard Kaikow's web site.
"Jonathan G Campbell" <jg.campbell@ntlworld.com> wrote in message
news:5dbd4e4a.0403120732.1fa5fbb@posting.google.com...
> Tim Cambrant <tim@cambrant.com> wrote in message
news:<048c92197a4ce512da0bb1804875aa6b@news.meganetnews.com>...
> > Hello, I am a 19 year old soon-to-be university student, who is
> > really interested in learning to program. I can code a bit in
> > C, and have created several small playful programs, such as
> > a simple name generator, etc. Lately, it has become evident
> > that playing around with code doesn't really lead anywhere. I
> > would like to be able to read and hack code while understanding
> > the entire concept of a program. Right now, my skills in
> > programming doesn't take me very much further than the actual
> > language itself. What I'm failing in is understanding and
> > producing _programs_. I own a C reference manual, and have tried
> > to understand lots of source code for established programs written
> > in C, but this kind of studying doesn't really cut it.
> >
> > To the point, I'm looking for someone with a decent amount of
> > knowledge and skill in programming, who would be willing to take
> > on a student for some mentoring. I don't expect much, but someone
> > who could be available via e-mail that could answer questions and
> > throw a few exercises with increasing difficulty my way would be
> > wonderful.
> >
>
> If you could persuade yourself to go with C++, I's suggest buying
> Koenig and Moo, Accelerated C++, Addison-Wesley, 2000 and working
> through that. Plus, I'd offer to lay out a (more specific) program of
> study and execises and offer to help when you get stuck. I sort of
> know that book; never have taught a course using it, but have used it
> for 'top-up' help like you request.
>
> OTOH, if C, I dunno. The King book mentioned earlier is reputed to be
> the current best book for learning C; but I don't know it or own it. I
> used to have a C course on the web (based on K&R), but that website
> has been taken down and if I was to reinstate the notes, I'd have to
> revise the course, and I cannot see that happening soon. The thing
> about that course was that it had notes and a sequenced set of
> exercises based on a twelve week course. I think you need something
> like that. (If you Google <j.g.c. K&R>, you'll find part of the course
> in the middle of a PostScript file in some US university site.)
>
> If it was Java (which I'd strongly recommend as superior to C or C++
> for learning programming), then it might be worth looking at the
> course at http://www.cis.ksu.edu/~schmidt/CIS200/. I've helped someone
> through that -- with some success. Maybe Bruce Eckel's Thinking in
> Java? Nice book, but I have no experience of using it as 'teach
> yourself'.
>
> Another poster suggested picking a project that would be useful and
> interesting and use that to learn by. Good idea. But only as a final
> project -- after, say, 150--200 hours work on basics. Again, if I was
> your advisor, I'd attempt to get from you what you'd like to do for
> this, or I'd suggest something, and then I'd include exercises that
> would eventually be useful as building blocks. Nothing too difficult,
> e.g.: maintenance of contacts database held on a flat file (that's no
> more than three or four C++ or Java classes); maintenance of a
> bookmarks file, ... The thing about such a project is that, with C++
> or Java classes, it's relatively tractable as a learning exerise --
> say 20--50 hours work. If you attempt to do it in C (without a
> class-like design, i.e. abstract-data-types), you might never come out
> the other end.
>
> Of course, I should admit that, from previous experience, I'd be
> expecting very quickly to reach a point you (the learner) decided that
> /your/ way was better than the textbook's or mine, and there we'd have
> to part :-(
>
> The email address given is real, so feel free to contact me privately
> -- it'll be nice to get a real message to go with the 500 or so per
> day spam messages ;-)
>
> Best regards,
>
> Jon C.

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