so I made the (unfortunate) mistake of getting into a skype convo with a friend of mine who is a math genius/programmer currently doing stuff for Nasa.

Anyways, he was going on about how everything is inferior to c#/java (for the most part) except for cases where you absolutely need a different language (like assembly).

He really hated c++ for some reason.

He said that if I read

Pro C# 5.0 and the .NET 4.5 Framework (by Andrew Troelsen)

I will learn more in a month or whatever than I will learn during my 2-3 year stay at college.



While on the skype convo he streamed some of the shit he had made with it and it seemed really interesting. I think he was over-estimating my current knowledge though.

I dunno. It seems like the obvious answer is yes, but I just get this awkward feeling when I think about it. I've never been the type to just pick up a how-to book, read it and attempt to do stuff along the way. Which is strange because it seems every cs guy I talk to has done this.

Just looking for other peoples opinions like usual.

are you asking for advice on c#/java or that book specifically?

if the former, then you should stick with whatever language you're already comfortable with. once you nail the concepts down, then try other languages.

if the latter, afaik c#5.0 isn't even out yet. this book is on preorder at amazon. you should wait a few months after it comes out and read the reviews. i dont know if that book just covers the new features in 5.0, assumes you're new to c# (and know OOP in other languages), or assumes you're an absolute beginner (which you want). you also don't know if it gives you walk-throughs for sample projects or not. when i read my first book alone in high school, i remember it didn't go step-by-step. it assumed i was already familiar with the IDE and OO and such, so it left quite a bit out and i got frustrated. i changed to a different book targetted towards beginners and it helped a lot.

i learned 3.0 several years ago and used wiki to keep up with the 4.0 features.

if you're not the kind of person who can learn from a book, then wait until youtube videos come out. or better yet, find a friend in the same boat you can learn with. you still have your programming assignments in your C++ class right? you can do those same assignments in C# probably.

thanks. both answers were useful.

nasa programmers are so kind

sounds like it

he is a pretty annoying person to deal with

His advice about languages is not something I'd expect from a genius...
You pick the tools that are right for the job. Sometimes it's C#, sometimes it's C++, often it's neither, rarely is it java (lol imo)
Rarely do people use assembly, and if they do, it's usually tweaks to C.

If he's writing C# for NASA I'm afraid he's not doing the interesting stuff that's done in C

I thought you had to use assembly for lots of things. Like communications between the pc and hardware etc.

Not really, no. Most drivers are just written in C.

Calling a programming language inferior is just bad. You have many different languages, and each of them has their goal. As an example, if you want to develop for the web, c# might be your best bet. But try to make a program that works with the hardware in C#, and you'll see it's not really the language to choose. C++ is much more superior in this scenario.

I work with C# and web development here at the company, but i'm trying to make some programs in C++ and reading books and tutorials about ruby on rails, and theres even a guy here at work who is starting a project in python. My point is, people should stop thinking "Im a C# developer" or "Im a C++ developer" and should focus their thinking into "Im a developer". Thinking like this, people can choose the best tecnology to solve a problem and also have an overall view of all the tecnologies at their disposal.



This is true, but it happens more in computer science because there's a lot of good material in the internet for free, and computer science students usually have thirst for knowledge and are self tought, with is very good. But you should not think "I can not do this", everyone in the IT market can teach temselves, the materials on the internet are very good and very vast, just choose a topic that you want to know more and google for it, you'll see a lot of good stuff.
Say you want to learn C++, the first google result for the search "C++" is http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/ and the first google result for "HTML" is http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp.