I can answer that.... actually no i can't. Well some people are just born with that gift, others read "The Dream Maker" written by the great Dantom.

I've been programming in DM for 13 and 1/2 months now. Here's basically how I started.

The first thing I did, actually, was e-mail Dan who, at the time, I didn't realize had anything to do with BYOND's creation, asking a little bit of what BYOND was.

The first thing I tried to read was the Guide, which, since BYOND was my first attempt at programming, was a bit beyond me. But, the people on the forums pointed me to the ZBT tutorials, which I eagerly made my way through.

ZBT was my best starting point. I worked my way through the tutorial and, using bits of what I'd learned, added bits to it until it became a small game.

After that, I went through the Guide (which finally started to make some sense) and figured out one thing after another. After that, I just hosted my game lots and got over-involved in Morte. All the while though, I was reading and asking questions on the forum about how to do specific things that I wanted in my game.

After that, I basically learned from asking sensable questions at Newbie Central and from gawking at tutorials, demos and libraries far too much. The Reference was a big help once I figured out how procs worked along with the rest of the code, and even more so once I understood how to build my own procs.

After that, I've just been learning bit by bit. As Gughunter once said, you're always learning new things about DM. There are still plenty of things that after more than a year I don't know how to do. Heck, there are plenty of things that people who've been here for many years still don't know how to do. You can't expect to learn everything. You're best just learning what you need to know, a bit at a time.

And finally, you'll never get any help if you insist on building games that everyone on the forum is against. That is, ripoff games, and games which generally make the system look bad, such as the endless hordes of DBZ games and, right now, games such as "Sonic online", "Final Fantasy Online", or "Dragon Warrior Quest".

Show that you're willing to put effort into it, and that you're interested in building something original, and people here will be willing to help you (so long as you follow forum rules).

Hi, I got started reading ZBT... er wait no...

I started by reading the Guide, then by trying to code things I wanted to do, looking for commands in the Reference I could use, and pestering Tom and Deadron.

Z

Zilal wrote:

Hi, I got started reading ZBT... er wait no...

Hahaha!! Oh, classic..my eyes are all teary now..haha..ha..ha, done.

I started by reading the Guide, and when that failed I went rumaging through the tutorials, demos, libraries, and forums to find things that I could relate to from other languages I've picked up (like PHP, C, and Java). Once the light came on in my head I went back to the Guide and tried out some small code snippets and picked apart some of the demos that had source code with them. I even purchased the Blue Book by sneaking Euros across the border to a secret agent in the States...

Then the light went out (because someone closed the refrigerator door) as I shifted focus to community building with digitalBYOND.org... I haven't actually touched DM since...

Oh wait, this was about 'great coders' eh?