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[qwertyuiopas]

In my opinion, the most powerful aspect of C/C++ is that they are both much easier than any form of assembly language or lower, and have the flexibility to do anything.
Maybe not the best language for a beginner, but later on, it isn't restricted to having an interpreter(many languages, though some can compile to an independant .exe), most OSs have some form of it, although getting it to run on a new platform may take alot of work(Write for the platform you have. Consider other systems later, once you understand what you are doing), and both languages generally support any library equally well(except C++ code and compilers, though even then, the C style stuff works fine.)

Start wherever you feel comfortable, but don't stay with that one language forever. In these years, variety s very useful.


Also, anyone can write a working program on their first day, if they copy/paste from a tutorial. Actually, that is one of the better ways to learn, if after you have the (simple, or else it won't work well) tutorial that does something, you can make changes and see what happens.

If you have a tutorial that counts from 1 to 100, then you can easily change some of the numbers and find out if you understood it well enough to skip every second number.

[Blacken]

That's the kind of thing that pisses me off about learning to program.  You have to be a programming literate IT guy to learn how to program in the first place.

So, do you gurus have any advice for a goal-oriented person who wants to program?  I'd like to think my goals are very achievable, I've just never found a goal-oriented tutorial or command dictionary to make them happen.  Or for that matter, a program language good for beginners, since apparently every language is either an exercise in package wrangling frustration, or Python which doesn't actually run on it's own.

C# might be your thing. It's pretty point-and-run, and builds standard Windows executables (and runs on OS X or Linux without a recompile, though that's considerably more technical).

[alway]

Something I find particularly useful for learning languages is taking multiple tutorial codes for the same basic principle, and then jamming them all together until they fit. For example, while learning DirectX and win32 programming, I have used tutorials from 2 websites (TheForger's Win32 and an online directx9 tutorial) and 2 books (DirectX9.0c by Luna and DirectX10 by Jones) and by throwing things together from the various sources, one really gets a feel for what works, what doesn't, and more importantly, how things fit together.

[moghopper]

Good luck to you! I think mountaineer is a good game idea.

(I wish I could learn to code. Alas...)