bah i went straight to c++(and then vc++) and it didnt give me any headaches all you need is a good book.

Learn the basics in basic, duh. Now you know what variables, for loops and do-while loops are. Great.
Now since you actually can''t do much in Basic (hehe, actually my brother made a fully graphical RPG in it...started out at least. Remember peek and poke? ) move on to C. Now you can make real programs! The first actual program I made was a thing that searched for all mp3s and ripped the ID3 tag from it and made a list them all, I converted it to windows later - could even do html output .
When you know your way around all the cool stuff in C, the standard library, structures, union..the works. Picking up C++ will be just as easy as eating pancakes . Books are great for learning too (C in a nutshell, yay).

"Paranoia is the belief in a hidden order behind the visible." - Anonymous

All you need is dummies. All that BASIC/PASCAL stuff is crap. Get yourself a C++ for Dummies book, get yourself Windows Game Programming for Dummies by Andre Lamothe and your set. The C++ book will teach you the syntax. The Lamothe book will teach you the basics of game programming. After that, programming is all about data structures. Either get yourself a data structures book or look up tutorials on the web. Good sites on the web: Gamedev.net, flipcode.com, gamasutra.com.

When I started learning, I started with C, then went to C++, it wasnt that hard, took me about 3 weeks and I had them both down, I dont think you have to start with Basic, its to basic, dont learn very much from it, I think you should skip basic and get going on C, or C++ if you want, the OOP int C++ was the only thing that took me a while to get. I think you will be fine if you start with C.

i really don''t know how anybody could possibly
have a discussion 3 pages long on what programming language
to start with. i started out with c/c++ and i worked out
fine for me. the major problem here is to find the right book.
there are so many books out there that explain how to write a cd rom controler in the second chapter. i think that, every language is easy enough to teach you the basics of programming.
my point is that you should start with whatever programming language you like. from that point of view c might be even a better choice because some serious books, to learn from, are available for it. on the other hand... it''s true that c is hard to learn without a book, if not impossible.
another reason why i think that the actuall language is not so important is that the basic syntactical things like loops, conditional statements and so on are very similar in all languages. in my opinion, the real challange is to get to know all the basic structures and algorithms. if you start with this the knowledge of the language will increase with the complexity of the problems you are dealing with.

to conclude : use whatever language you like and stay with it.

I started on QBasic years ago. Never really got in to it. Now i want to do proper programming i might start on Delphi. which uses pascal. Anyone know any good books for this?

(1)what programming language are the best to learn first
answer: Visual C++ and windows programming, IMHO I think you can go straight into C++ without going through BASIC

(2)what software to buy
answer: if you have enough money, buy MS Visual C++ 6.0 and buy the DirectX SDK CD from Microsoft, if you don''t have money, get DJGPP and Allegro which are great programs and are free

(3)any other good site
answer: Gamasutra looks professional. I check out Gamespot to see which games are popular in the game market, PCdata to check sales of top games. RPGfan to check out news of RPG and RPG games screenshots and artwork.

(4)Where do you begin first?
answer: I learn BASIC first. Two books helps me a lot when I learn programming. One is a simple BASIC programming for kids that tells you how to create simple graphic, play simple music, create simple game. The other is a BASIC programming competition book that teach me how to apply BASIC in solving problem. Both book increase my confidence in programming and build my foundation of programming so that I can easily pick up other languages later.

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If you've read all the posts in this thread up to this point within one (1) day, you are officially labled a "no-life".
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Heck, even *I* skipped to the last page after the dribble on the first page..

No offense to you people who already are no-life's or don't consider yourself a no-life even though you just spent the last 2 hours reading this thread..



(BTW, I can't sepl, but just ignr that port).

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Irek | irek@seventh.net

Edited by - irek on August 14, 2000 1:26:27 PM

Irek :What is the point???


For Anonymous : The sdk is free of you can buy. Better free (and more fast to obtain)


What is the point of start :for Directx you can start in visual c++ or start in visual basic (the sdk have many samples for this). And you can jump from visual basic -> visual c++ in no time.
Directx for visual basic if very similar for directx for c++. For example the renderstate is the same.





-eng3d.softhome.net-

eng3d: my point is that a lot of the posts on this thread are pretty useless.. like mine. Sorry if that wasn''t clear

And since you expect me to contribute to the actual question, here goes:

I learned in this order: Basic and then Everything else (C, Perl, VB, HTML, etc etc etc (but not in that order)).

And all I have to say is, "Once you learn one, you can learn them all". Which is really true.. because a lot of the languages are the same (logically), they just have different words or/and syntax''s for stuff. Sure, OOP is different than how Basic works, but then again, the logical fundamentals can be learned through Basic too.

Now the question is, which one to learn first?

I say it depends on the person, and if you are bright and have a -good- grasp on how a computer ''thinks'' (in other words, you are very logical: you can figure out a new computer program without reading the manual, understand why something affected something else, etc) then you can pretty much hop into whatever language you want to really code in (for games, I''d say C, but jumping from C to C++ isn''t really a big deal). But, if you think you need to get your mind set with the computer ''mentality'' then I suggest working with a simple language like Basic so that you get the fundamental ins and outs of programming.. basic computer logic if you will. If you don''t have a grasp on basic computer logic, then things like OOP (object oriented programming) will be that much harder to grasp.

Just my cent or two.

:0




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Irek | irek@seventh.net