How do I start to learn programming?

[GreatEscapist]

I'm so sorry, but most of that went ooooooover my head.
But I think I picked up main points...things to look for when I'm learning the languages.

 

[rcgldr]

So how long did it take you people to learn C/C++/C#?

I already knew how to program in various languages. For me I just picked up what I needed to know over time as I wrote various programs in C. I've never used C++ for work, but have done some windows programming at home. One common practice for some programs is to use C++ for the user interface stuff, and use C for internal stuff.

Things to look for when I'm learning the languages.

For a student new to learning, I'm not sure what books or web sites to recommend. The main thing is a series of programs that you write as part of the learning experience, either adding onto something you're already learned, or branching off to a different aspect of programming. Maybe there's some online community college class you could take. Since you're goal is to learn how to program as opposed to wanting a tool to help you right away with something like a physics class, then C is a good enough place to start.

Regarding programming concepts in general, which I think was the point of some of the previous posts:

Modular programming - You separate the code for a relatively large project into a number of smaller functions (subroutines). This generally makes the code easier to follow, and makes it easeir for a team of programmers to work on a single project. Virtually everyone does this now, so it's not often mentioned.

Structured programming - whatever meaning it might have once had, it's mostly part of an ongoing debate, with experts disagreeing on the basics, like the usage of goto's. I wouldn't worry about it. As a game programmer, you'll be part of team and they'll have some type of coding standards already in place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured_programming

Object oriented programming - data structures and/or methods are combined to create "objects". You could consider a mailing address to be an object, it contains a name, street address, city, state, zip, ... Methods could include how to read/write mailing address objects from/to a file, or how to display them on a screen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming

Multi-threading. Since you want to be a gaming programmer, you'll have some involvment with multi-threading. With multi-threading you have separate programs that behave like or actually run on separate cpu's as part of a game, that include some form of communication with each other. For example one thread might be inputting a players controller inputs sending the inputs to another thread does the physics calculations, which then sends object position update information to a graphics thread which updates the image seen on the screen.

Parallel math. The cpu's in PC's and also the gpu's in video cards have the ability to do math on a list of numbers instead of just one number at a time. This can be used in a game's physics engine to speed up the calculations for object position updates. The cpu and gpu's makers supply libraries to simplify implementation.

prime number generation examples

I'm so sorry, but most of that went over my head.

Most of the examples show how to create a list of prime numbers via an iterative process that tests one number at a time. Since the letter "l" looks like the number "1", it's a bit more difficult to follow. The "declaritive" example uses a language type that you're unlikely to encounter in a game programming environment.

 

[D H]

Moderator input:

Please keep this discussion on track. Also, please remember that this is a 15 or 16 year old we are trying to help, not someone pursuing a PhD in computer science.