Want to re-learn programming for a more modern application

[FrankP]

Hey friends,

 

So I started programming about 2003-05 when I was learning HTML I was only in 7th and 8th grade at that point I just always loved it. Then I continued in high school my school only offered 2 C++ Classes that was in 07 & 08. Fast forward I graduated High School in 2009 and went to college for computer science. I did 2 years in that major learned 3 semesters worth of JavaScript with BlueJay. Unfortunately I can't remember any of it because I switched majors to something totally different because I hated the department and teachers. Nothing against anyone but I had 5 semesters of heavy accented teachers and wasn't really learning anything. I digress back to my point (sorry).

 

I am going to school currently for Biolog and plan to go into something medical be it Physical Therapy, Orthopedics, sports medicine idk yet. I want to get a masters in Computer science at some point because I have career plans that I would love to be able to do myself by programming the necessary applications to assist me in my future work. Is there any coding languages and resources you guy would recommend since I am super outdated in this field of study.

 

My overall goal for coding is to be able to make multiplatform computer-based exercise and rehab programs. A website for myself which I can embed this program in also as well as a few other things that will come later on as necessity presents itself. Just looking for some guidance from some real experts who are current in this field thanks in advance.

 

Sincerely,

Frank

[Sensei]

Download free Visual Studio Express from MSDN,

or it's called today Visual Studio Community.

 

Make single button app with GUI editor,

assign some task to button,

do this task in button.

(imagine what task you want from your app f.e. call other executable?)

 

Then make new app, with more buttons,

each button, different task.

(it could be math calculator?)

 

Then make new app, with list view,

scan files, and folders, in some parent folder,

make list view items for list view.

 

Day by day, programming,

nobody will learn you in advance, including school, nor employer.

 

You have to have open mind. And programming, day by day..

Programming things that you need. Or for experimentation.

Edited December 21, 2016 by Sensei

[_Rick_]

Hey friends,

 

So I started programming about 2003-05 when I was learning HTML I was only in 7th and 8th grade at that point I just always loved it. Then I continued in high school my school only offered 2 C++ Classes that was in 07 & 08. Fast forward I graduated High School in 2009 and went to college for computer science. I did 2 years in that major learned 3 semesters worth of JavaScript with BlueJay. Unfortunately I can't remember any of it because I switched majors to something totally different because I hated the department and teachers. Nothing against anyone but I had 5 semesters of heavy accented teachers and wasn't really learning anything. I digress back to my point (sorry).

 

I am going to school currently for Biolog and plan to go into something medical be it Physical Therapy, Orthopedics, sports medicine idk yet. I want to get a masters in Computer science at some point because I have career plans that I would love to be able to do myself by programming the necessary applications to assist me in my future work. Is there any coding languages and resources you guy would recommend since I am super outdated in this field of study.

 

My overall goal for coding is to be able to make multiplatform computer-based exercise and rehab programs. A website for myself which I can embed this program in also as well as a few other things that will come later on as necessity presents itself. Just looking for some guidance from some real experts who are current in this field thanks in advance.

 

Sincerely,

Frank

 

Yeah you should learn Virtual Basic, a quick bit of googling will find you learning resources etc. I can't recommend a good VB online course unfortunately. You should try to just program a solution for any problem you have, academic or personal if it's a real solution to a problem you'll enjoy it more.

 

As for your website you should be fine just learning PHP, CSS, HTML. You don't even really need to be very good to make a good looking website nowadays anyway, you should just be able to make an alright one whilst learning.

Edited December 21, 2016 by _Rick_

[FrankP]

Download free Visual Studio Express from MSDN,

or it's called today Visual Studio Community.

 

Make single button app with GUI editor,

assign some task to button,

do this task in button.

(imagine what task you want from your app f.e. call other executable?)

 

Then make new app, with more buttons,

each button, different task.

(it could be math calculator?)

 

Then make new app, with list view,

scan files, and folders, in some parent folder,

make list view items for list view.

 

Day by day, programming,

nobody will learn you in advance, including school, nor employer.

 

You have to have open mind. And programming, day by day..

Programming things that you need. Or for experimentation.

Thanks, yea I will give this a try I think java stopped in college when we got to GUI based programming. I vaguely remember trying to code a group project where we had to make a program which was visually appealing but also interactive. That was the hardest thing from what I can remember. Also didn't help that I was doing a group project by myself. lol

 

 

 

Yeah you should learn Virtual Basic, a quick bit of googling will find you learning resources etc. I can't recommend a good VB online course unfortunately. You should try to just program a solution for any problem you have, academic or personal if it's a real solution to a problem you'll enjoy it more.

 

As for your website you should be fine just learning PHP, CSS, HTML. You don't even really need to be very good to make a good looking website nowadays anyway, you should just be able to make an alright one whilst learning.

Thanks to you as well. I am as we speak re-learning HTML, and some CSS as well. I typically am a self-directed learner so I do know what you are saying about trying to program apps to fix my academic problems. I remember back when I was doing C++ I made a calculator type program to solve my difficult pre-calc problems back in high school that was the greatest thing for homework haha!

 

So as far as websites are concerned though I want to be able to eventually have interactive content, such as websites which contain moving graphics, more advanced GUI and such. Would that all be available through CSS now? or would I have to embed something like JS or use some more advanced web design code? Like I said back when I was doing websites (not that I am old) I was doing them on HTML 4 which I now understand the modern HMTL is drastically different in almost every way.

[_Rick_]

Thanks, yea I will give this a try I think java stopped in college when we got to GUI based programming. I vaguely remember trying to code a group project where we had to make a program which was visually appealing but also interactive. That was the hardest thing from what I can remember. Also didn't help that I was doing a group project by myself. lol

 

 

Thanks to you as well. I am as we speak re-learning HTML, and some CSS as well. I typically am a self-directed learner so I do know what you are saying about trying to program apps to fix my academic problems. I remember back when I was doing C++ I made a calculator type program to solve my difficult pre-calc problems back in high school that was the greatest thing for homework haha!

 

So as far as websites are concerned though I want to be able to eventually have interactive content, such as websites which contain moving graphics, more advanced GUI and such. Would that all be available through CSS now? or would I have to embed something like JS or use some more advanced web design code? Like I said back when I was doing websites (not that I am old) I was doing them on HTML 4 which I now understand the modern HMTL is drastically different in almost every way.

You don't need to be a professional to make interactive web applets anymore, js will probably be the most useful but to be honest other people have made such good embeds nowadays you can learn just about any language with a similar paradigm and somebody will have embedded it in a browser. But JS can be fun and it certainly encourages you to learn.

 

To be honest you probably don't even need to learn or even fully understand PHP or SQL if you're not doing any backend management.

[pzkpfw]

Yeah you should learn Virtual Basic, a quick bit of googling will find you learning resources etc. I can't recommend a good VB online course unfortunately. ...

That'd be a mistake. With the Microsoft tools, you'd be better off with C# than Visual Basic. Much more like the various other common languages, e.g. the OP's previous experience. VB puts one in a bit of a backwater.

[Klaynos]

That'd be a mistake. With the Microsoft tools, you'd be better off with C# than Visual Basic. Much more like the various other common languages, e.g. the OP's previous experience. VB puts one in a bit of a backwater.

 

I can't stress this enough!

 

My advice would be highly application dependent. If you want to write Windows apps then c#. Web apps then get used to Linux especially command line and learn php. Mobile phone apps then Java. Statistical work then R (or python but I personally don't really like it).

 

And on websites. I'd suggest XHTML and CSS. Only use js for functionality you really really need and CSS can't do. W3c had some nice validate tools, I imagine they still do.

[Sensei]

Thanks, yea I will give this a try I think java stopped in college when we got to GUI based programming. I vaguely remember trying to code a group project where we had to make a program which was visually appealing but also interactive. That was the hardest thing from what I can remember. Also didn't help that I was doing a group project by myself. lol

Java is not the same as JavaScript. It's common mistake to mix them.

Java can be executed on client side, in web browser (Java Applet), or separate on virtual machine, or smartphone/tablet/device with Android,

or it can be executed on server side (Java Servlet), and generating HTML or other files which server will return to client.

 

JavaScript can be exclusively executed on client side, in web browser.

 

JavaScript is also plentiful harder (IMHO) to learn for beginners, as there is no one implementation.

Each web browser has missing/extended objects, classes, methods. It lacks the real documentation.

Often more complex code is working in one web browser, and not the other.

Often code is working in one version of the same browser, and fail with other versions.

It's discouraging for beginners.

 

In contrary to C#/C/C++ .NET Framework GUI builder with programming functionality of controls. See how easy it goes:

Edited December 22, 2016 by Sensei

[Strange]

That'd be a mistake. With the Microsoft tools, you'd be better off with C# than Visual Basic. Much more like the various other common languages, e.g. the OP's previous experience. VB puts one in a bit of a backwater.

 

 

Agreed. Visual Basic is an abomination and a terrible learning tool. C# (from the little exposure I have had) looks pretty good. IF you want to use a Microsoft-centric language and development tool.

 

As the OP spoke about cross-platform development, I would go for something more standard such as Java or Python.

Thanks, yea I will give this a try I think java stopped in college when we got to GUI based programming. I vaguely remember trying to code a group project where we had to make a program which was visually appealing but also interactive. That was the hardest thing from what I can remember.

 

Indeed. Programming is primarily a design exercise.

 

Coding in a particular language is "merely" implementation and it shouldn't really matter what language you learn first - it just needs to be appropriate for the application and the target platform.

[PlaneGraph88]

To create an application easily in a mix - and - match UI components manner, I would recommend Visual Studio Community Edition and C#. as is already recommended. Alternatively, if you want to go with Java, I'd recommend using a good IDE as Eclipse or Netbeans and go through it, but it will be definitely way more difficult., as you have to refresh / learn a lot of things about Java in order to create a full blown app. The whole thing depends on how much you like learning programming and the time / efforts, you're willing to put on this.

 

If you want to develop a website or webapp from the ground up, you have to learn HTML5 in order to build a modern one, some CSS3 and JavaScript for the client side. For the backend, some server side scripting language (I'd recommend PHP) and some things about databases (I'd recommend MySQL for RDBMS). Of course, you have to learn to use some tools like a good web IDE (I'd recommend WebStorm but there is a whole multitude of other great IDEs as well), a CSS framework like SASS or LESS - I recommend the first and a good JavaScript framework (JQuery is my recommendation but it is good to take a look at other frameworks as well), in order to do your job easily and smoothly. On the other hand, if you just want to build a website with almost no effort, you can go with some CMS (like Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress etc.). As I said above, the whole thing depends on what you want to tinker with / learn and the time/ efforts you want to spend.

Edited December 22, 2016 by PlaneGraph88