Hi Rune,

This is not an easy question to answer. I guess there are as many ways to learn
programming as there are programmers. I myself study systems development and
programming in a university, but I think that if you're motivated and used to
learning things from books you should buy some books and just start learning.

My only experience before starting my studies here was some BASIC programming on
the C-64 back in...uh...1985....(geez...that's a long time ago..), and my way
has been Pascal - C - COBOL - C++ - Delphi - SIMULA - Perl and of course - lots
of POV during all this! =)

To learn the basics I think Pascal does a good job. If you compare programming
to LEGO, Pascal is like DUPLO if you see what I mean. You get an understanding
af all the basic concepts: variables, procedures, functions, pointers.
(We used the book Turbo Pascal 7.0 by Walter Savitch (can't provide an ISBN
number for it), and I think it was a quite good book in how it decribed the
different parts of the language and programming in general.)

Then, I actually think it's time for an Object Oriented (OO) language. If you
know POV, you might have a slight understanding of what OO is as sphere{}, box{}
etc. actually are instances of "classes" and #declare MySphere=object{sphere{}}
is some sort of inheritance.

If I was a teacher and my students were open-minded to learning a language just
to understand a concept, I'd teach them SIMULA, which I believe was the first
OO-language ever invented. But nowadays people want to program in Java or C++
right away, so I guess that would be rather hard to motivate them to do. But
technically, SIMULA gives a good understanding of the OO concept.

Then it all depends on what you want to do. Database applications? Games? DOS,
Windows, UNIX or Mac programs? Network applications? Delphi seems to be quite
popular for (Windows) database applications, while Java programmers are the most
sought-after by software companies overall.

But, back to the subject: buy some books in for example Pascal or C, and go
ahead with learning the basics first. At least this is how I got started.

- Mikael.

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Mikael Carneholm
School of Business and Informatics


http://www.studenter.hb.se/~arch
E-mail: sa9### [at] idautbhbse

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