In article <3B0E62CB.141CDEFA@gmx.de> , Christoph Hormann 
<chr### [at] gmxde>  wrote:

> Therefore i suggested studying things before.  I never learned programming
> systematically (apart from some Basic at school) and i think i learned
> most about programming by studying others' code.  Some things of course
> also require reading of books, but IMO that is usually an automatic
> reaction when looking at the code and not understanding things (unless
> there are some friendly Povers in range you can ask :-)

This is very true.  Reading other code speeds up learning, and in fact that
is how I started (and still learn i.e. how to use some API), too.
Nevertheless, it is much easier with Basic than with C.  Further, studying
small examples help, but studying a big piece of code like POV-Ray, with all
the complex interactions and side effects you have to think about takes much
longer than learning from small examples.  Also, the POV-Ray source code is
not the ideal code in many ways - it developed over years, and many of its
tricks and tweaks would never be used in a rewrite because they are simply
far, far away from being ideal.

> Learning programming systematically by reading books and doing programming
> exercises is of course not bad either, but it can be quite frustrating and
> it does not train you to understand code written by others.

I think this really depends on the book.  There are a lot of bad books out
there (i.e. 1000+x books about Java, but only four or five are good) and
picking the right one can be very hard, even for someone who knows the stuff
already and "only" has to pick for a book others!

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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