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onewaytrip
February 23rd, 2006, 10:01 PM
first let me inform yall of my situation. ok im a computer science major and so far been learning c rather its the only language every professor in my school uses. well for the most part i love it i find it to be very fun and interesting.

now here my problem, ive been in school for 3yrs now though i feel im better at c than any of my classmates i feel like after 3yrs all information i receive so far is just introductory c. it gotten to the point were i feel im just learning enough to get by(just in school) and nothing i would really use for real time programming. so far every program i have written has just been simple little programs like a calculator, and a program to find out how many students in the class are this or that, etc... now when i go home i want to study and learn more but the problem is i just dont know what to do. i have no ideas for writing a program that would be of any use and even if i did i would more then likely not be able to write it anyways. it have become very frustating working so hard at school them coming home feeling like all you learn was just how to play with some numbers and letters.

so recently i began doing research on programming and found a lot of good advice but the problem is it usually for people who have well knowledge of programming and any projects i find online are usually way to advance for me. so can any of ya help to point me into the right direction to improving my programming skill and way i can be a better programmer overall.

thanks in advance and sorry the thread is so long i wanted try to give you enough information so you can at least picture what im going through.

suRoot
February 23rd, 2006, 10:42 PM
Are you looking to join a project, or do your own thing?

Here's a listing of projects needing help at sourceforge - - - maybe you'll find something that interests you.

http://sourceforge.net/people/?category_id=1

toojays
February 23rd, 2006, 10:45 PM
Learn a Lisp. You can learn the gentle way using Programming in Emacs Lisp (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-lisp-intro/), take the intermediate road with Practical Common Lisp ( http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/), or go hardcore with the SICP (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/).

Any of these books will advance your knowledge, and make you a better programmer overall.

onewaytrip
February 23rd, 2006, 11:29 PM
thanks ill check it out for sure, also i want to do both work on my own projects as well as a team project, but the problem with team projects is so far all the ones i seen are too advance for me but i willing to offer any help i can either way.

jerome bettis
February 24th, 2006, 08:36 AM
is this a junior college or something? if you're in your 3rd year and still writing a calculator, change schools. most programmers get past that stuff around 10th grade. a good C programmer will always be in demand though, but it sounds like they're not really teaching you good C programming. maybe i'm wrong

really what i would do if i were you, is (after you change schools :-D) is go on some job websites and get an idea of what is in demand. (things might be different in a year though) .. but if i would have done this myself, i'd be getting paid well to do what i love, instead of sitting here practically broke with no health insurance. my right nut hurts and i gotta pay for a doctor. no fun.

so i've decided to learn j2ee. this webapp stuff is actually a lot of fun, i'm having a blast with jsp and this giant baseball database i found.

Van_Gogh
February 25th, 2006, 09:53 PM
If you're searching for ideas to work on, something that I really would like to exist is a OpenOffice.Org pedant to pyExcelerator (http://sourceforge.net/projects/pyexcelerator/). pyExcelerator is a very easy *platform independant* program to create and write to excel files from within Python. At the moment it seems that to do the same with OpenOffice Calc you need first to understand the OOo XML format, which is outside of my capability, so for my batch spreadsheet creation I need to use the excel format for now, something which bugs me a bit.

This may not really be a job for C, but it would give you an opportunity to do something that many people would find really useful.

onewaytrip
February 26th, 2006, 07:18 AM
thanks, even though its not in my field ill check it out anyways and see what i can do.

Van_Gogh
February 26th, 2006, 03:45 PM
Sounds great. If you ever get it flying, I'd appreciate if you let me know. My email address is terji78 at gmail dot com.

Note that I've tried doing it myself and have failed so far, but maybe I can point you to some resources and give some hints:

OpenDocument files are really just zipped archives: try renaming a *.ods file to *.zip. You'll see that ods files are really just zipped XML files. In Python zip-files can easily be opened with standard library module zipfile.

There's a book on the OpenDocument format here (http://books.evc-cit.info/). If you knox XML you may not need it, but it was understanding the format that broke my neck. If you can get your head around the format my guess it that it will not be too difficult to implement this.

If you decide to go ahead with the project, I'd be more than willing to help out in any way I can. I'm fairly proficient in Python(love the language!) and interested in getting this done, so feel free to contact me for help.

onewaytrip
February 27th, 2006, 08:14 AM
great, ill give it a shot plus it sound interesting. just need to do some research first and a some studying. should be a great learnning experience for me.

bbqbaker
February 27th, 2006, 01:24 PM
build a video game from scratch. a real decent version of breakout or tetris. you will learn alot about programming plus it will beef up your resume. make it very efficient and learn about lower level programming.

when i hang out at gamedev forum, i always feel i didnt learn anything in collge so now im planying ketchup.

Alpha_toxic
February 27th, 2006, 02:21 PM
If you really want to learm sth usefull, try reading some books about algorithms. A good algorithm is what makes the difference between a good programer and a great programer. Anyone can learn how to use the API's, but try calculating an integral or the flow capacity of a graph...

I can advice trying Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programing". Look what opera.answers.com gave me for "knuth"

Hacker Slang
Knuth

[Donald E. Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming] Mythically, the reference that answers all questions about data structures or algorithms. A safe answer when you do not know: “I think you can find that in Knuth.” Contrast the literature. See also bible. There is a Donald Knuth home page at http://Sunburn.Stanford.EDU/~knuth/ .

thumper
February 27th, 2006, 05:14 PM
The best advice I would give is "find a mentor". Someone who is at where you want to be, someone who doesn't mind mentoring you. Learn from them. There is nothing like it - better than books alone, and way better than university (my experience at least).

The hard bit is then "how do I find a mentor"? Now that is not a question I can easily answer. Initially I'd suggest something like the ACCU (www.accu.org). They have a section for mentored developers. It is a place where you can sign up for a project - either development wise or going through a book, and there are mentors that follow the list and can help out when necessary. There is also the ACCU conference in Oxford, UK each spring at which you can put a face to the names that you come across in the lists. Unfortunately ACCU is mostly UK based, however there are pockets of members around europe and in the states. When I head back to NZ later this year, I'll be pushing membership there.

onewaytrip
February 27th, 2006, 08:26 PM
lots of good advice here, gonna keep me busy for a while for sure. also to the person that said learn game dev, well im doing that now and for the most part seems pretty easy when it comes to 2d games but 3d is where it gets kind of tricky dealing with vectors. also i have to say that it is helping me learn a lot because im actually applying what i know while learning new things as well. again thanks everyone every reply is very insightful.