Am I learning programming right?

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Hey!
Im currently learning Objective C and PHP (I can pretty much code in PHP completely independently).
I mostly learn off of tutorials on the internet and I just type the code in the tutorials my self and that tends to work well for me. I do also read books on Objective C (I would buy more but at the moment I dont have too much money) that I bought when I started properly programming. I have been coding in PHP and Obj C for about 1 year and a half so far.
I can look at Objective C/C++ code and I could probably tell you what most of all of it means.
I cant code completely independently yet. I still need help from tutorials from time to time.
Does this mean im bad at code? Is a year and a half bad to be at this stage?

I do plan to buy some more books to improve my independence in Obj C. Do you think I am doing everything right?
Programming is something I have a real passion for and I hope to build my own business ontop of my programming skills eventually.

Any ideas?
Thanks!

Practice makes perfect.

ruveyn

Suppose so.
All I have ever wanted to do is become good at programming. I have been coding in Visual basic since the age of 7-8. Its only been since the beginning of 2011 that I have done any real programming. I suppose Im not doing too badly but its kinda hard to see that considering its me who's learning it. An external opinion is always a good thing!

Maybe casually at Barnes & Noble or somewhere leaf through books on other languages and when a project whets your appetite, see if you can do it in Objective C or PHP?

And with artistic/technological projects, I think it's normal to have both finished and unfinished projects, and okay to give yourself permission to move on to the next project. And with human clients, the standard advice is to (slightly) underpromise and (slightly) overdeliver.

There is quite a lot that you can find on the web about programming. Blogs, video talks/lectures, advice, tutorials, reference material, etc. There are some books you can get for free online.

There are also programmer-specific boards that might be a better place to go than here. If you go to a specifically Objective-C board, you can probably ask for a critique of your code or look at a critique of someone else's code. If you see someone saying you should always do X, ask them why. X might be the best way to do it, but you'll learn something much more important if you understand the reason why people do the things they do.

I think both are potentially valuable, yes, there are going to be some Objective C boards. At the same time, we can talk about, as different people who are on the spectrum, our experiences with learning languages. When I was learning C++ from 1998-2000, I compared it to writing a story with beginning, middle (where we typically do the looping, meaning the useful work), and end (where we gracefully pull out and summarize and present the information we got). And it really started to dance when I used pseudo-random numbers to address problems in probability, for with these, I really did not know the answers ahead of time.

Maybe understanding narrative and story is what I do best as a human being. I tend to get either A's or F's in math class, perhaps because it depends on whether I have the time and energy to translate the math into words.

Seems you are trying to do mostly by reading and following examples? I find that to be a good way to learn completely new things. But for programming in general I think it's very important to be able to use the language to solve a problem. This is not something a tutorial is going to learn you. Try to write programs on your own, find your own solution. When you get comfortable with the basic concepts you could try using more features of the language.

My tips is that you give Project Euler a shot. On Project Euler there are hundreds of problems to solve, like finding the 1000th prime. Try solving some of them with your own code. If you ever get stuck, you an use Google ( that's what I do ) or ask here.

In general; don't start out trying to learn every concept of a language, focus on writing code instead.

Hey, thanks a lot! Does anyone know of any other books/sites like this?

Have you gone through the usual problems of sorts and searches. Such an excursion might sharpen up your programming skills.

ruveyn

If anything I said made it sound like I think asking here is a bad idea, then it didn't come out right. If he wanted to post some of his code here, I'd take a look at it and try to critique it, but then I don't know either Objective-C or PHP (although I do know some similar languages), so I'd miss nearly everything language specific. There are probably some people who know Objective-C and/or PHP around here, but there would also be more on a language specific board.


That's rather interesting. I've been wondering a bit about how other people think, since I've seen several instances of people thinking much differently from me recently. A lot about how people think abstractly is described in words as a metaphor, which is kind of like a short story.


Ruby Quiz has a bunch of problems that are generally pretty good. It's a lot less mathematical than project Euler. There's also a book called 'Best of Ruby Quiz' if you want a hardcopy. The problems are set up for Ruby, but they aren't very language specific.

VB is real programming... professionals use it every day.

That's a poor definition.

Any programming language that is Turing complete, and for which there is a compiler or interpreter, is a real programming language.

Do compilers and interpreters not exist for VB? Where the defined-before-implemented languages of old not real programming languages (Algol 68 being a stand-out example)?

My definition includes VB of course. If there is no compiler or interpreter for a given language, you can't really program anything with it, can you?

True.

Not every language is equally suited for every task, though. VB isn't that suited for operating systems or game engines, for example.

They wrote the Pascal compiler in Pascal, and "ran" it through itself by hand.