thats about when i started, end of middle school. in retrospect, i'd rather have hit the gym at 13 instead of coding. hindsight/10

Well, unless hitting the gym gets you a job, it doesn't really matter.

if you wanna learn in actual steps, start with Turing, it teaches you pretty much the basics of all computer languages that you can use elsewhere. After that you can go into som higher level languages like Java or C, and progress from there, most "main" languages uses same/similar structure just with different syntax. After you learn somewhat of a higher level language (like Java/C) I suggest trying out a lower level language like Assembler and then see which one you like, then go on and learn languages based on that.

for beginners who aren't sure if they wanna be in the CS field, i disagree. the focus should be on practical things that a typical app developer would do. the average developer will never write assembly outside of college. to really understand assembly, it's best to learn some CE first (datapath, registers, mux, etc). that's a huge time investment that shouldn't be pursued until AFTER you're sure you wanna study CS (either as a hobby or career)

wat

saw you browsing the topic earlier

This post was edited by carteblanche on Apr 8 2012 04:40am

LIKE A

NOT A GOOD ONE

learn from a pro



This post was edited by carteblanche on Apr 8 2012 04:59am

I started with turing, then next was visual basic, then java. (This is what they taught in my high school, in this order)
Then I was thought java, c++,c#/SQL(in MS SQL SERVER 2005,not now ofc :P) & asp.net(vb.net,javascript/jquery/json/PHP) (main ones in college, in this order)

I've found most of the places I've worked at (Banks, P.O.S. Software Companies, Web Dev.) were usually after a client server guy.
If you weren't thinking Web Dev. some good places to start would be;

Windows forms (C++ has its place, but c# for client/server model)- Used in lots of internal, non-customer facing projects.
WPF (Again I like c# code behind for client server model) - Used in lots of external, eye-candy data binding intense applications.
Direct X Libraries and C++ - You can find a lot of documentation on how to load mesh's onto object models with textures \ materials, with the direct x libraries on the web. After that, look into translating and transforming your matrices and vertices to make them move and interact with click events. I didn't touch this kind of stuff until I was about 4 years into programming. You'll really want to be fluent with your object oriented programing, calculus and trig skills to get into the core of graphics engines.

There's a lot to learn my friend, but there's a world to learn from!

Just keep waking away at them "hello world's" and really understand what your learning.