About programing, a general question

[Jerry Feldman]

On 12/21/2010 05:39 AM, Bob Marcan wrote:
> On Fri, 17 Dec 2010 15:04:30 +0530
> Parshwa Murdia <b330bkn at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Fri, Dec 17, 2010 at 2:02 AM, Rodolfo Alcazar Portillo <nospaze at gmail.com
>>> wrote:
>> My first programming experience started with Coco-TRS80 basic. Then I
>>> knew I will love computers.
>>>
>>> But as amazed as I was, I was hungry to learn the guts of programming.
>>> Lucky me, I was introduced to the Norton Pink Shirt Book. Wow. Learning
>>> Pascal, Cobol and Fortran in one year, with 12 years old turned to be a
>>> piece of cake. C would follow.
>>>
>>> The book deals mainly with simple hardware of those ages and a little
>>> bit of 8086 assembler, AFAIR. Knowing all of that, understanding Basic,
>>> C or any programming paradigm turned to be easy for me.
>>>
>>> Then I worked for 15 years. A couple of years ago, on vacation, I read
>>> the "C Programming Language" by Brian W. Kernighan, Dennis M. Ritchie,
>>> and made all exercises, just for fun. That's another beautiful book.
>>>
>>> That's my history. I would advise to start from the low level: study a
>>> bit of hardware, to be able to learn C or/and Assembler (low level
>>> programming, maybe you can skip assembler, or just read some code).
>>> After, enjoying high-level language programming (java, informix, perl,
>>> php, python, etc.) will be your prize.
>>>
>>
>> I guess, yes, C would be good but do you agree that it is good over Python
>> (for the beginners like me, having known the fact that programing principles
>> are same)?
>>
>>
>> (If anyone has a pdf copy of the Pink-Shirt Book, I would thank if
>>> mailed, my original is 5000 miles away :)
>>>
>>> Cheers!
>>>
>>
>> I am first time hearing this book name.
>>
>>
> Bible:
>
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithms_%2B_Data_Structures_%3D_Programs
>
> BR, Bob
This is an excellent book. We used it when I took the data structures
course for my masters degree. In retrospect, I would have preferred
Knuth, but this was and is a great book to learn data structures. At the
time, Pascal was hot, and as I mentioned before it is a good language to
teach these concepts. But, it would drive me crazy at work when I would
see a C program written by a Pascal programmer :-). Actually, Knuth is
the Bible, and Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs is the prayer book.

Another issue for the OP is where you want to use the skills you learn.
If you learn Python, but want to write code for the Android, then maybe
Java might be the way to go. But, simply to learn a programming
language^<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithms_%2B_Data_Structures_%3D_Programs#cite_note-0>
, Python is relatively easy and well documented. If you are going to be
a system admin person then scripting languages such as Perl, CShell, and
BASH scripts might be useful.

I have taught C at a local University, and one group of people learned
very well and another group really hated it.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
PGP key id: 537C5846
PGP Key fingerprint: 3D1B 8377 A3C0 A5F2 ECBB  CA3B 4607 4319 537C 5846


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