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Newbie

Neil Macneale macneale at cats.ucsc.edu
Thu Sep 7 03:47:46 EDT 2000 
Brendhan-

I don't have any suggestions about what book or tutorial to use becasue
the book I had was for people who already knew about programming.  This I
can tell you after learning four languages over the last two years:  You
can not break anything.  Just type in things and try it out.  Look at
other people cade and figure out why/how it works.  The code you create in
the next week will look terible to your own eyes a month from now,  and
the code create in a month will look childish in a year.  It is all part
of the growth process.  

Python is an ideal language because it is pretty easy to get things done, 
but you will know it when you have done something wrong.  I always found
that perl works for the wrong reasons.  Java takes a lot of effort for the
compiler to deam it worthy.  C's basic library is far too limited.

The last bit of advise:  You must come up with a problem you are
interested in solving.  When starting a new language I usually slam out a
program to give the prime numbers from 1 to 1000.  It doesn't require much
code,  but it is satifying to see your code do something.  After you do
that,  write something more complex.

Good luck!

Neil

In article <C%Bt5.6859$IO.66057 at news3.mia>, "Brendhan Horne"
<brendhan at bellsouth.net> wrote:

> I am really new to this. I have never worked with any computer language
> before. I have downloaded Python 1.6 for Windows. I have downloaded the
> tutorial which for me is a bit dry and a tad difficult to understand. So as
> I go to unzip this what should I expect?  What are some good beginning
> exercises to start with on this? Please understand that I have not written
> anything in a computer language before and have no idea what kind of
> prompts are with this, hell I wouldn't even be sure of when to press the
> enter key.
> Thanks in advance
> Brendhan
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