Dollieh Sanctuary

Hi guys - I know a few of you on here know a fair amount about computing. And well I was wondering if anyone knew of any good resources for beginners and upwards that are floating around?

And indeed... Any recommendations about languages?

I've seen an awful lot about R floating around of late, so I'm determined to try and find something there, it sounds like a useful one to pick up. Which of the numerous iterations of C would you suggest? (Or not at all? I've nearly heard as much moaning about C*, C++ and the like as actual uses for them!)

I've been working my way through codecademy's tutorials recently, and whilst they are excellent they are very much geared towards beginners and web developers rather than anything truly substantial. And the lack of advice about where and how to actually apply the newly found knowledge seems a bit glaring, unless I've not gotten to that information yet!

I am not very familiar with coding, but my boyfriend wanted to learn it. He wanted me to learn just "plain" C, so checked some books from the library.

One of them was quite useful the few times that used. It is called "A Book On C" . It was good book because it is explain line by line what you are doing.

Disclaimer: I only do scripting these days (javascript, powershell and vbscript) as these are what I need to help me in my job. I've not done any actual programming for over a decade!

That said, I would turn it around and ask what you want to achieve, and then look at languages that are a good fit.

C++ and Java (not the same as javascript!) are good all-round languages; R looks to be a statistical/data modelling language that I vaguely remember a colleague in a previous job talking about - it will have more specialist uses, but if that's what you're looking for it would be worth learning it (and if you use Excel a lot for that sort of stuff as well, i'd suggest vbscript to help bludgeon it into doing what you want). C++ could be considered to be a superset of C - I've come across as many arguments saying you should learn C before you learn C++ as I have saying you don't need to. You've then got Objective-C for Apple's OS X and iOS, and C# which was developed by Microsoft.

For general learning I prefer an ebook that I read on different screen than the one I'm practising on, but if I'm honest most of what I'm doing these days is trying to find a scripting solution for a specific problem so I just google it. Not helpful for learning the basics though.

Thanks guys!

I'll take a look at that book you recommended.

Yeah my reasons for wanting to pick up coding are multiple, a big one being to just learn something new after an enforced period of relative idleness, so far the relatively minor stuff that I've managed has been like solving a puzzle, and it's been rather satisfying having something to show for the time spent (and another non-minor but by-no-means major reason is it's a pretty decent skill to put on a cv that implies problem solving sklls).

Um yeah the applications for R - are pretty much exactly the reasons I want to pick that one up, the kind of data analysis that I've been brute forcing through excel could be done far more quickly, and indeed accurately using that language! A compSci friend of mine has pretty much said flat-out that I should get used to java, python and the like before moving up to C and it's numerous variations. I think I'll follow that advice! Since for now I'm still at the excited "this new stuff is so sparkly and amazing!" honeymoon period of learning, and haven't actually produced anything truly substantial yet.

Thanks for the tips, I think I need to have a bit of a sit down to work out precisely why I'm trying to learn this/these skillsets. At least part of this is purely for myself (I've got to admit it's been a niggle of mine for a while that I allowed my university tutor to talk me out of taking the computer science option back in the day); in that I'm one of those people who tends to want to know why/how things work. I know quite a bit about the hardware of the computers that I take for granted everyday, but understand very little about the whys and wherefores of the software that powers it!