I'm 15 and I've fully made up my mind and have decided to become a software & and game programmer. I currenly go to a highschool where the computer classes isn't that great and I only have time to acess a computer is on weekends due to school. I plan on going to a good technology/computer science college and I was wondering if it would be to late to start learning now, and I know you atleast need some experience or an idea about the subject so..... any suggestions or input?
~GS
ID:188891
 Dec 6 2003, 9:16 pm
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Dec 6 2003, 9:23 pm
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Sticky_Chronic
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Theres plenty of sites and stuff where you can learn everything that you would from going to college. Be a freelance programmer and learn everything on your own without having to goto college. Or you can get some background info or whatever and then goto college and get a "job", o yay... You can make good money as a freelance programmer.
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GSurge wrote:
I'm 15 and I've fully made up my mind and have decided to become a software & and game programmer. I currenly go to a highschool where the computer classes isn't that great and I only have time to acess a computer is on weekends due to school. I plan on going to a good technology/computer science college and I was wondering if it would be to late to start learning now, and I know you atleast need some experience or an idea about the subject so..... any suggestions or input? Certainly it's not too late! A lot of us "oldbies" didn't even have access to computers until later on in life. My best advice is to find a project that sounds fun and interesting and stick with it until you have completed it to your satisfaction. It doesn't have to be practical or relevent to anything else you might be doing. The computer language you code it in doesn't really matter. You just need something to inspire you to learn the concepts (which you can learn about in books, but ultimately will be driven in through experience). You are fortunate to be learning in a time when you have access to a wealth of information and like-minds, but don't abuse it, because in order to learn anything you'll have to do the work. Good luck! | |
no, its not too late. I'm 16 and have computer programming. I just started and already at the arrays on the 2nd week. BYOND really helped me a lot and that class helped me on BYOND a lot too.
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GSurge wrote:
I'm 15 and I've fully made up my mind and have decided to become a software & and game programmer. I currenly go to a highschool where the computer classes isn't that great and I only have time to acess a computer is on weekends due to school. I plan on going to a good technology/computer science college and I was wondering if it would be to late to start learning now, and I know you atleast need some experience or an idea about the subject so..... any suggestions or input? Even though I'm perhaps the oldest oldbie around here, I've had the fortune of having access to computers since I was pretty young (TRS-80 rulez!). Even so, I didn't *really* start learning programming until I took a C class when I was in my early 20s. That single class, at a city college, launched me on my entire career and made a massive change in my life. It's never too late. Especially since the need for programmers is growing quickly while, if anything, the relative supply is shrinking. The jobs are challenging and interesting, the pay is nice (programmers are being paid at lawyer-levels these days), and yet people aren't going into this field! So it will be wide open for you whenever you get into it. | |
I've been with computers since comadore 64 (Not THAT old)...then again i don't even know what a TRS-80 rules.
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Karasu Kami wrote:
I've been with computers since comadore 64 (Not THAT old)...then again i don't even know what a TRS-80 rules. Commodore 64 was the high-end cool computer to have when I was in high school...specially since it played games. (And, goodness, you could get a HARD DRIVE for it!) Apple II and TRS-80s were my main high school computers, though. It was nice when the Apple II got lower-case. Prior to that many people online seemed to be YELLING AT EACH OTHER. Prior to that it was the Commodare PET computer, which is where I learned to play the Towers of Brahma. Toward the end of high school you were cool if you had one of the first Macs. | |
Deadron wrote:
It was nice when the Apple II got lower-case. Prior to that many people online seemed to be YELLING AT EACH OTHER. Don't you mean on-line? =P | |
DarkView wrote:
Deadron wrote: Once a term comes into common use, it is traditional to drop the hyphen (email, for example). The entire time I've been involved in technical writing (about 13 years) I've been arguing with editors that online is way past being a common term. | |
Sorry about the spelling..i just kind of forgot and stopped caring how to spell it..one game i loved was the racing game where you could crash into buildings and watch the little guy run around on fire...ahh...Good times.
But sadly...that computer has been laid to rest.. (I destroyed it..got just a bit too bored and took it apart to see how it worked. Then i couldn't put it back together, that just sucks doesn't it? You think i could have sold it to bill gates for 1k? Any takers? ^^;) ..Continued.. The only thing i destroyed was the floppy disc drives, the games and monitor are in "MINT" condition. (Besides their ugly color and little scratches here and there on the plastic) | |
Man, my first computer was a nice Tandy. I don't remember themodel, but at the time (1991), it totally rocked. Because of that computer, I learned how to use DOS. I didn't know how to do much with it; it didn't have a hard drive (ROM as it was called back in the day), and it read GIANT floppies. Back on that beast, there were units of space on the computer called nibbles (a nibble is half a byte...hahhaahhaa get it?)
I didnt' start programming until I got QBasic. After that, I did a lot of programming on PDA's oddly enough, then I got Dev-C++ and did a little C/C++ programming. I tried ASM programming, but it was hard. My friend showed me this site because of a DBZ game, we wanted to make our own, then I read ZBT#1, and now...well that's been quite a ride. I want to be a programmer when I "grow up". I know it's contradictory and stuff, but I really do. Not a "boring" programmer though, I want to be on a game's programming staff. I know a guy who worked for Blizzard, and he helped with Warcraft I and II. All he did for the game was draw bitmaps, and when he wasn't doing that, guess what he was doing? He was playing other companie's games and then writing down what the competition had to offer, and how to make a better game. He got like 300k for that job. How great would that be? | |
Anarchy Robot wrote:
it didn't have a hard drive (ROM as it was called back in the day) A hard drive was never considered ROM...ROM stands for "Read Only Memory", and of course a hard drive would not be read only at any point in history. However it wouldn't surprise me if some early computer users got the concepts mixed up. I do remember the giant floppies...those were a hoot. | |
My first computer was the trs-80 CoCo 2, when I was 12 or 13. Around 1997. About 15 years after it was first on the market:D Of course I had no idea how to program, all I could do was copy and type out of the book and play those games, which half the time didnt work:D Of course, after a while i learned how to use print and input, and a little about the IF/THENS to make a program making fun of my brother... lol, and also the PLAY command, that was some good times...
Then a year or two later I got to thinking about that old coco and remembered that the language was called BASIC, so I did a search at my school, and fount QBASIC, oh man I was in heaven... (Built in help!!) so i really took off and learned quite a bit of programming.. Then in a forum I learned about DarkBASIC.. someone had showed me a demo, and at first i thought it was written in QB and wondered how on earth they did it... They told me it was DB, and I had played with that for about 4 years. I'm quite good at that language, but its very hard to find resources like models and textures, and basically... it took too much out of me, Then I stumbled across BYOND, forget how, but I loved the language, the object oriented nature, the complete opposite of BASIC... it was just so... different, and easy to make or find icons, so my imagination isnt limited to the art, but the language itself, which, I'll tell you, isn't a problem, because when you imagine games within the realistic bounds of the language there really is no end to what you can do... Anyways, im just rambling now... hehe.. | |
Jerico2day wrote:
Of course, after a while i learned how to use print and input, and a little about the IF/THENS to make a program making fun of my brother... lol, and also the PLAY command, that was some good times... Man, Basic was so lame, but when you're learning it it seems cooler then anything else ever. | |
I like it too, I was just commenting on how while you are learning about if/then it seems so exciting, but in retrospect you wonder how someone could get so excited over something as simple as that.
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Jerico2day wrote:
i like basic...so there:p When I was learning BASIC the only computer available to me was at school. But I was totally obsessed so I would get books on it and read them all night, writing programs on paper so I could type them in the next day. At one point going through one of my first books, killing myself to understand this stuff, I come across some sample code and it says: <code>REM Draw a circle.</code> I was so pissed! Here I am learning all this intricate complicated stuff, and all I really needed to do was type "Draw a circle"??? (It was a while before I understood that REM was a comment...) | |
Best language to learn first would be DM, at your current age level, seeing as you can't get into a specific class for any major programming languages...DM however has the blue book,(tutorial) so you can learn it for free without having to goto a classroom...and of course, with demos, libraries, and the forums here...You can learn the language inside and out.
Plus you learn to use the 'programing' mind-set early on, so when it comes time to learning the bigger languages, like C, you will(should) have an easier time. | |