Post: #126

(03-13-2016 04:22 PM)weambulance Wrote:  

(03-13-2016 04:04 PM)bleaknight Wrote:  A semi noob here, I've just gone through the angular 2.0 hero tutorial and I fail to wrap my head around the 'promise' concept. Learning this angular stuff is killing a decent amount of my brain cells.

I don't use AngularJS but I understand what a promise is after reading this article. There's good stuff in the comments too.

Cheers for that, just finished reading it, definitely helped my understanding. I think the next step is now to build something on angular to fully understand it.

Post: #127

I'm going to not be with internet for a while but I will still have access to a computer and I'd like to start working on programming. Can someone recommend some offline tutorials or resources for a newbie to programming. I've been searching online at python, visual studios, c++ (since some consider it the best language to learn first but that's obviously personal opinion), php etc. but I'm overwhelmed by the different amount of information, compilers, platforms that are out there. Since most of the links in French Corporation's thread are dead, Im kind of at a loss for how or where to start.

I've been looking at this thread on reddit for python tutorials which then recommends this book but I'm unsure whether I'm on the right track or not.

Post: #128

"Real Python" is an excellent trio of books. I was stuck on airplanes a couple months ago and went through a big chunk of that material. Think Python is cool too.

If you are completely offline it will be tough because you'll always want to be downloading stuff and experimenting. You can get through the first course of the three without connecting much.

Pretty much all the intro level books are going to teach the same basic things, the main difference between them being the order and style the material is presented.

Post: #129

For an introduction to basic programming concepts a good (online) place to start with for a complete noobie is Codecademy.

@Alpha Hunter Zero

First, decide what is that you want to do.

If you want to write software for websites (or don't have preferences), start with PHP. It's easy to learn, gives you a lot of freedom and is a good starting point to learn other languages in the future.

PHP is an "interpreted" language meaning you don't need to compile anything, you just write plain text code and let the server worry about everything else. You can easily install a server on your PC with all that you need to run it offline, for example WAMP or XAMPP.

You will also need an editor (or an IDE; integrated development environment). Sure, you could write everything in Notepad, but these just make your life so much easier with syntax higliting and various tools. I personally use phpStrom which is not free, so you may want to try other like PHP Designer or Netbeans instead.

Then buy a book and work through it. I used to have a book called "PHP Essentials", was great for beginners. Some things may be a bit outdated now, but the concepts still stand. Or find something newer on Amazon, just make sure you search for PHP books for non-programmers/beginners.

You should also download the PHP Manual which may seem a bit overwhelming, but contains reference to all the functions and what each does.


If you want to write applications (for Windows for example), you will be better off with Visual C#, Python etc. C++ is more difficult to learn and requires much more computer knowledge.


If you want to write mobile apps, learn Java.


P.s.: nowadays you can find so many tutorials, examples and code snippets online that it really make it easier to work with an internet connection.

Post: #130

I haven't started going through Python yet, (I'm learning discrete math before that,cause I want to improve logic skills) but according to sources like quora and reddit the best books for beginners are Learn python the hard way (which is avaible for free), Think python and How to think like a computer scientist

There's also a python course for beginners avaible on codecademy if i'm not wrong, you could pair it with a book of your choice

Post: #131

(03-16-2016 11:09 AM)GillesDeleuze Wrote:  I haven't started going through Python yet, (I'm learning discrete math before that,cause I want to improve logic skills) but according to sources like quora and reddit the best books for beginners are Learn python the hard way (which is avaible for free), Think python and How to think like a computer scientist

There's also a python course for beginners avaible on codecademy if i'm not wrong, you could pair it with a book of your choice

I did not like "Learn Python the Hard Way" at all. It's been a while, but what I remember is: poor exercises and explanations, he tells you to google stuff a lot which I don't see much value in.

If you want to learn python in a very practical way I can recommend:
https://www.coursera.org/specializations...ndamentals

The two first courses are pretty much the highest rated university courses online, ever. However, the whole program is great. If you do the whole program which is approximately 28 weeks, you will be a pretty capable programmer at the end. *Capable programmer defined as can start simple/light-intermediate projects on your own.

Post: #132

Quote:If you want to learn python in a very practical way I can recommend:
https://www.coursera.org/specializations...ndamentals

The two first courses are pretty much the highest rated university courses online, ever. However, the whole program is great. If you do the whole program which is approximately 28 weeks, you will be a pretty capable programmer at the end. *Capable programmer defined as can start simple/light-intermediate projects on your own.

It seems pretty solid from the several positive reviews, thank you for the input.

Post: #133

My 2 cents: you do not need to be good at math to be a good coder. It may help or it may not, YMMV.

Learn to build something, start with a simple shopping cart site in the language of your choice. IMO going through the process of headaches of actually building a something is much more than anything you could pick up from a book.

Intro courses and books are fine for grasping the basic concepts of coding, but showing real world deployable applications is what sets a candidate apart from the rest.

Stackoverflow will be your best friend: my day to day is stackoverflow until I can figure out how to implement something.

Post: #134

(03-16-2016 11:09 AM)jbo Wrote:  For an introduction to basic programming concepts a good (online) place to start with for a complete noobie is Codecademy.

@Alpha Hunter Zero

Quote:First, decide what is that you want to do.

I simply want to learn a language so I can have a foundation to then progress into other, harder languages. I don't currently have a preference as to what I want to use it for.

Quote:You can easily install a server on your PC with all that you need to run it offline, for example WAMP or XAMPP.

I downloaded XAMPP as the wampserver website wasn't in English.

Quote:You will also need an editor (or an IDE; integrated development environment). I personally use phpStrom which is not free, so you may want to try other like PHP Designer or Netbeans instead.

I already have NetBeans from when I downloaded Java some years back so I'll use that here. I want to eventually learn Java as well.

Quote:Then buy a book and work through it. I used to have a book called "PHP Essentials", was great for beginners. Some things may be a bit outdated now, but the concepts still stand. Or find something newer on Amazon, just make sure you search for PHP books for non-programmers/beginners.

I'll order PHP Essentials but I want to start immediately so I looked around and found this and this. Hopefully they teach the right way to program.

Quote:You should also download the PHP Manual which may seem a bit overwhelming, but contains reference to all the functions and what each does.

Done.

Is there anything else I need to do to start?

Post: #135

I never read the books you downloaded. They still base on PHP 4 that isn't really used anymore, but the basics are the same as in current PHP 5/7.

Based on a quick look you might be better off finding something for complete beginners. Something with real-life examples (haven't read one in a long time so I can't really give recommendations here). As a side note: the second book starts all code with short opening tags <? versus the full <?php , make a habit to always use the full tags as short ones may be disabled on some servers.

That's all you really need to start PHP. Good luck.

Post: #136

@jbo: Thanks so much for your help. I hate to be a pain in the ass but I still have some issues. Regarding XAMMP I downloaded version 3.2.2 and I'm running Windows 7 Home Premium SP1. Upon opening it I had no idea how to set it up so I looked on youtube for instructions. This one runs the same XAMMP version but on Windows 10 and he really goes in depth including messing around with local ports upon initially setting up, messing around with system accounts in command prompt, as well as messing around with things in the registry.

My concern is even though the xammp versions are the same will the stuff he's doing still be applicable to Windows 7 (or even necessary for what my purpose for using the program is). I followed the video exactly for the first few minutes but already there were a few different outcomes which raised a few red flags.This concerns me because I don't have too much of an idea what exactly I'm doing here and how to change stuff back in the registry (or in the system) if I need to in the future.

There seem to be various ways to set up based on what I've seen. Some say just to start up apache, mysql, etc right when you first begin in the control panel such as this and then set up some other things later on. Others, like this also do it differently (the version in this video is also a different one but I'm sure that isn't too big an issue).

Perhaps I'm just being too paranoid but since I'm new to all this I'd like to be extra careful with my pc. Is there a specific method I should follow, like any of those above, or does it really not matter how it's done before I can actually start programming with PHP?

Post: #137

^ We've all been there as newbies trying to learn. Don't be overly concerned with all the stuff the guy in the video is doing. Sooner or later, you'll be doing the same thing if you are serious about learning to code. You might break shit, and then you'll learn to fix it. And in the process, you will learn. It's a lot harder to fuck up your PC than you think, especially just installing WAMP/XAMPP.

I use Bitnami's WAMP: https://bitnami.com/stack/wamp.
Try that out if the XAMPP package you dl'ed isn't working for you.

The endpoint of your specific task is to see if Apache is working so you can get developing: Assuming the install went correctly, if you open up your browser and type in localhost in the address bar you should get something. What that is depends on the package and how you installed it.

BTW, while we can help you out, your go to should be stackoverflow. If stackoverflow doesn't know, Jesus doesn't know.

Post: #138

General in regards of coding/technical tutorials. Which do you prefer, text/picture based or videos? I find myself text based tutorials much easier to follow, in videos you can easily miss something and need to pause all the time to catch up.

Post: #139

I personally use Wampserver, here is the English version of the website:
http://www.wampserver.com/en/

It's pretty much click to install, run and works out of the box.

Post: #140

Quote:Posted by evilhei - Today 05:12 AM
General in regards of coding/technical tutorials. Which do you prefer, text/picture based or videos? I find myself text based tutorials much easier to follow, in videos you can easily miss something and need to pause all the time to catch up.

I don't really have a preference when it comes to text/picture based or video tutorials. They both have their pro's and con's. Like you said, text/picture tutorials are much easier to follow and on top of that they eat up WAY less data, which is crucial especially if you're on a mobile plan (which is currently my case). Oftentimes text tutorials will only tell you what to do without explaining too much.

Videos eat up a lot of data but the narrator will, most of the time, explain the reason why he's doing a specific thing. The problem is you can spend a long time looking for videos pertaining to your particular issue and still come up short handed.

In a nutshell I can maneuver with both, depending on the circumstances, but would prefer text if possible.

Quote:Posted by jj90 - Yesterday 11:25 PM
^ We've all been there as newbies trying to learn. Don't be overly concerned with all the stuff the guy in the video is doing. Sooner or later, you'll be doing the same thing if you are serious about learning to code. You might break shit, and then you'll learn to fix it. And in the process, you will learn. It's a lot harder to fuck up your PC than you think, especially just installing WAMP/XAMPP.

I use Bitnami's WAMP: https://bitnami.com/stack/wamp.
Try that out if the XAMPP package you dl'ed isn't working for you.

The endpoint of your specific task is to see if Apache is working so you can get developing: Assuming the install went correctly, if you open up your browser and type in localhost in the address bar you should get something. What that is depends on the package and how you installed it.

BTW, while we can help you out, your go to should be stackoverflow. If stackoverflow doesn't know, Jesus doesn't know.

Thanks for the words of encouragement, I really do appreciate it. I'll check out stackoverflow in the meantime.

Quote: Posted by jbo - Today 05:13 AM
I personally use Wampserver, here is the English version of the website:
http://www.wampserver.com/en/

It's pretty much click to install, run and works out of the box.

Thanks again for your help, man. I'll mess around with Xammp a little more but I'll save wampserver on a flash drive in case I start to wreck my brain here.

Post: #141

You're welcome and good luck. It may take a while, but once you get the hang of one language it's easy to learn new ones.

Post: #142

Okay I've been messing around with PHP using Wampserver like I was advised but I ran into a minor problem with some code the other day while embedding PHP within HTML. I also created a CSS stylesheet as well (seperate file) in addition to this. Both were placed in the document root folder.

Quote:<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”>
<head>
<title>Hello</title>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”common.css” />
</head>
<body>
<h1><?php echo “Hello, world!”; ?></h1>
</body>
</html>

*Formatting may be off. Don't know if there's a proper way to do that.

Every time I type the file name (in this case it's hello_pretty.php) into localhost on Wampserver I get this error message:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '!', expecting ',' or ';' in C:\wamp\www\hello_pretty.php on line 9

I've done everything I could think of, such as tampering with the code, putting it into an IDE, copying and pasting directly from the source and nothing gets rid of the error message.
I consulted Stack Overflow but they simply directed me to a bunch of other links with generic info and surfing the net hasn't really helped as well. Can anyone tell me what the hell I'm doing wrong here?

Post: #143

^ Try escaping the exclamation mark and see if that works?

Post: #144

Yep. Your quotes around Hello, world! are the wrong kind of double quotes. What text editor are you using? In Sublime, it was obvious the text inside the quotes wasn't been considered a string, but rather functions, due to the syntax highlighting I use.

Also, you can ditch the ; after the string if you're closing the php tag right away.

   

Top line is yours, bottom is my new line that works. See the difference? However you're getting those double quotes, change it.


Edit - to clarify, there are two sets of double quotation marks in the unicode character set. The curly ones like in your code apparently don't work in PHP.

Post: #145

(03-28-2016 09:20 PM)weambulance Wrote:  Yep. Your quotes around Hello, world! are the wrong kind of double quotes. What text editor are you using? In Sublime, it was obvious the text inside the quotes wasn't been considered a string, but rather functions, due to the syntax highlighting I use.

Also, you can ditch the ; after the string if you're closing the php tag right away.



Top line is yours, bottom is my new line that works. See the difference? However you're getting those double quotes, change it.


Edit - to clarify, there are two sets of double quotation marks in the unicode character set. The curly ones like in your code apparently don't work in PHP.

You're right, that was the problem! To make a long story short, the code was chopped up in a book I was using so I copy/pasted the last 4 lines but apparently in the book the quotations were messed up (although the quotation style in both the book and notepad dont show it). Honestly I didnt even notice it in my post above as I was so fucking fed up with fumbling and exhausting my brain with this specific shit for the last few days.

Truthfully after seeing your post I pasted to Microsoft Word and an IDE (that I had used to try and figure out what was going on) and I now noticed that detail.

Post: #146

Had to learn some node.js today. Was OK I guess. These trendy languages are a subsidy program for new CS majors... They build valuable new packages to lock themselves in to a consulting career. Smart.

Post: #147

Anyone here trying to learn Swift 2? Open source now!

Post: #148

Do you need a major in CS to be a programmer?.I'm reading all over Reddit that it is unnecessary but I know that website in full of keyboard warriors. If I get a bachelor's in accounting and my MBA, and know Java really well, can I land a entry level programming job? How much would I make starting out in a smaller market?

Post: #149

(03-29-2016 11:32 AM)Phil Jackson Wrote:  Do you need a major in CS to be a programmer?

Not really.

/thread-26260.html

Post: #150

Answer is no but have a decent portfolio. People in the industry care about skills.