Summer of Coding

[EddWills95]

Hi guys,

not sure how many of you are involved in the coding and developing world or as a hobby, but i've got a whole summer free pretty much and was wondering if anyone could suggest some languages to learn.

Nothing overly specific, i've recently bought this c++ book - http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1435457420/ref=oh_details_o02_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I don't know if this was a good buy i'm only about 30 pages in.

So if anyone has any other suggestions of where to get started with some web design stuff or app development (i know c++ is standard for games)

Thanks for any advice

 

[yassarikhan786]

For web design stuff you can have a look at these books (I've used these personally and they are pretty good):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/HTML-CSS-Design-Build-Sites/dp/1118008189

http://www.amazon.com/Learning-jQue...id=1373392972&sr=8-1&keywords=learning+jquery

You should be able to find them cheaper elsewhere

 

[EddWills95]

cheers mate, i'll def look into them.

 

[d3rrial]

I think you'll have a LOT on your hands with C++, sorry I will not be more helpful with other languages, but if I can recommend a couple of things for C++, I'd like to do that:

First of all: http://www.boost.org/
If you want to do some serious C++ coding, look into that, its VERY hard to learn as beginner, but it is well worth it
Second: http://qt-project.org/
Its pretty easy to learn and works very good, also its a somewhat good framework for cross platform coding (see boost for more advanced stuff)

Then there's of course the IDE you are using that plays a huge role: I recommend Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 if you develop on Windows machines, for windows machines. I can't currently recommend an IDE for Linux or OSX tho, as I mainly develop on Windows machines.

If you don't want to spend money on this, use the Express Edition of it, its free: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/eng/downloads#d-2012-express

Some things you could start learning with on your own (I wouldn't recommend using only books, always try to experiment a lot) are Multithreaded design for Windows and Linux systems and socket programming. (Like for example Winsock or boost::asio)

If you really don't want to do C++ and I wrote this for nothing I can always recommend php and jQuery. php is one of the most important languages in Web Development and should you choose to venture into that field, I would highly recommend learning php. If you want to do web design, not web development, start with HTML and CSS and maybe some JavaScript.
Sadly I can't recommend any books for any of those languages, because I have not used books to learn those.

Other popular Programming languages are C# and Java. I DON'T recommend learning Java because it is of the devil, but C# is alright, if you can get yourself to code almost exclusively for Windows machines using .NET

I hope this helps and if I can be helpful in any way, feel free to PM me at any time!

Edit:

If you would want to learn Android coding, you'd need to learn the forsaken language that is Java.

 

[EddWills95]

oh wow. i really appreciate all that info i've been working my way around the express edition. and using that to code along-side the book i've linked. i will probably be pming you soon, so expect that hahah

 

[d3rrial]

oh wow. i really appreciate all that info i've been working my way around the express edition. and using that to code along-side the book i've linked. i will probably be pming you soon, so expect that hahah

Hehe, please do!

I'm between jobs at the moment, so I have a lot of time on my hands if you need help

 

[yassarikhan786]

For website stuff, there are also tonnes of online resources. These are some of the websites I visit on a regular basis:

http://css-tricks.com/
http://tympanus.net/codrops/
http://www.css3.info/

 

[litchu]

I believe coding shouldn't be learned from books, but from actual coding itself.

In addition to the links above this one might be usefull for web development:

http://www.w3schools.com/

If you really don't want to do C++ and I wrote this for nothing I can always recommend php and jQuery

Just on a note, jQuery isn't a language just a javascript library. But being able to use jQuery in a website is quite nice!

 

[yassarikhan786]

I believe coding shouldn't be learned from books, but from actual coding itself.

In addition to the links above this one might be usefull for web development:

http://www.w3schools.com/



Just on a note, jQuery isn't a language just a javascript library. But being able to use jQuery in a website is quite nice!

This is true. I learnt most of the stuff I know from experimenting. Books just act as a guide.

 

[d3rrial]

[...]
Just on a note, jQuery isn't a language just a javascript library. But being able to use jQuery in a website is quite nice!

I know its not a language, but jQuery is so much superior to plain JavaScript, I decided to mention it seperately

 

[EddWills95]

Yeah i've been talking to d3rrail and i've learnt way more in half an hour than i have from about 2 hours of reading.

Practice Practice ...

Cheers guys

 

[SPS]

I just want to reiterate, if you're serious about learning to code then learn and become efficient in C++.

Creating a game is great goal to further your learning (although may be heavy on maths depending on how much you do for yourself).

I'd also recommend learning a scripting language alongside C++. Python would be my choice of weapon. There are many many reasons why I'd choose this over others, the main one being it is pretty fast due to it's C based libraries.
Resources by Google, note the lectures menu down the side. https://developers.google.com/edu/python/

 

[EddWills95]

So C++ is the one to go with

when you say scripting language. how do you mean ?? I've heard of python before with my dabbling with the raspberry pi

 

[SPS]

Scripting languages are a higher level programming language, they usually have a more relaxed syntax and a much greater array of libraries. There are many drawbacks to these as well though such as speed and less control.

Read about Python here

I would still keep your focus on C++ but when you fancy expanding a bit, have a look at Python. There are some very interesting projects with it (Pygame and Kivy for example).