Introduction

[mikey]

Hi remember me?
Yeah have been busy with NaNoWriMo. At the time I'm writing this it isn't officially over at least not in my time zone. I have fail the goal of 50k, but I got 46175, that's prettey good for me. Yeah, I better get to bed, I have school tomorrow.
Night

Yeah, timezones rule.Perhaps if you made your character scream *really* loud, like aaaaaaaaaaaa... (and so on) you could still make the 50k mark

[RedSlash]

Too bad they don't count in pages cause then you can set the font size to 14px Courier New.

[Tage]

Hello everybody!

My name is Jonathan, and I am 18 years old P=
Opposed to what others may think...I am male! ...=P ......
I live near Memphis, TN, USA but not in it...

I am Chinese-American, if you can call me that...there was a debate going on in my English class about tagging a nationality onto American if you were or weren't born there. I wasn't born in China, but my parents are both Chinese. I was actually born in Germany, when U.S. troops were stationed there in case there was an invasion. I don't plan on calling myself German-American, lol. I don't know anything about Germany. My father was the one in the army, and my family moved a lot. Let's see... After I was born in Germany, we moved to San Antonio, Texas; to Fort Benning, Georgia; to Cordova, Tennessee; to Harker Heights, Texas; to Midland, Georgia; and now back to Cordova, Tennessee.

I have been programming for at least 5 years now, at least 4 of those years being JavaScript... Finding no other foot through the software programming door, I am majoring in Computer Science at the University of Memphis. I'm also learning Japanese. I may do the JET program later in my college life, but I definitely can't do it at the moment.

I like to program (that's a given), watch anime, and play video games. Typical...just typical... I also like to eat, eat, eat, and uh, eat. OH, I like to sleep too. J/k n.n; Well, actually...I do... I dislike school and rude people!

My favorite games are renai games. n.n; I also like Final Fantasy X, Half-life, and Half-life 2 in particular. Uh... and I pretty much like all the other genres.

Anime series I like include One Piece, Inuyasha, Naruto, Outlaw Star, Full Metal Alchemist, Gundam SEED, Chobits, Bleach, Samurai 7, Rurouni Kenshin, Digimon, and many I haven't seen P=

Music I like include Linkin Park, Ayumi Hamasaki, Asian Kung-Fu Generation, Michelle Branch, Incubus, BoA, and others.

I'm working on a renai game with ren'py. I hope I actually have the dedication within me to complete it. P=

My college finals are over this week. (Yay!) Well, that's me. I'll be hanging around here.

--------------------------------------------

And after all the "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa"s, throw in a "choo" to mess with everybody's minds!

[musical74]

I feel OLD now...and I never would have thought 30 was old! LOL

Most of the stuff I have posted elsewhere but here goes...

My real name is Neil, have lived in Oregon almost all my life, love to sing and have been in a few musicals <hence the nic>...I enjoy most RPGs and adventure games, not to mention collecting fantasy elements <books, pictures of faeries, dragons, wizards, etc> am 6'4" 230ish for weight, have an interest in computer programming but it's more interest that skill...I have a few *for dummies* books on programming and A+ cert but need help with them...I have NO artistic ability when it comes to drawing, but have lots of ideas as far as storyline goes - spent part of a few months having a storyline with a friend involving dragons and faeries

Favorite color is purple, somewhat of a night owl, and would love to start programming once I get the basics learned...trying to teach myself is pretty hard chronoluminare, mikey, and anyone else who does programming...anyone want to help me out with what works and what doesn't? I DO have an active imagination, just not sure how to implement things from the *idea* stage to *programming* yet...

And yes, I am a guy!

[Sai]

would love to start programming once I get the basics learned...trying to teach myself is pretty hard :? chronoluminare, mikey, and anyone else who does programming...anyone want to help me out with what works and what doesn't? I DO have an active imagination, just not sure how to implement things from the *idea* stage to *programming* yet...

I do programming. My main focus is design (so I'm not a programmer, more like a multimedia designer) and I'm not very technically minded, but I learn programming to back up my design work which is computer based.

Firstly I would say to take classes. It's the best way because you're in an environment where a) you have to do the work to pass so you have that incentive (b) you have an experienced teacher there to explain everything to you and help you if you're having difficulty (c) you have other people around you who are learning too and may help you.

Aside from that you can try the QuickStart and QuickPro books. They are learning books (mainly for programming) which are very visual and try to explain things as easily as possible. They are often reccomended by teachers and would be a nice investment. They have books for most things. You can buy them in most bookstores I would imagine, or online.

In terms of going from idea to code. Just think what it is you want to do, then figure out the way to do it in code after.
When writing code for one of my classes, I always have to comment my code.
What that means is I have to write an English comment first what I want to do, then below that English, I write the code.

For example:

Code: Select all

-- the image needs to be invisible
member("image").visible=false

Writing it in English can help you to think of what you need to look up in code. If I wrote that I want to make something visible or invisible. I know that I need to change how visible it is. So I would go to a help book or the programs built-in dictionary and look up "visible" or something like that. And it would tell me what the code for that is and explain it a bit.

Good luck.

[PyTom]

One resource I like to point people who are new to programming at is How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python.

http://www.ibiblio.org/obp/thinkCSpy/

It covers the basics, though, rather than things like graphics libraries and the like. The hope is that once you understand the basics, you can simply read through the manuals and understand the libraries.

Programming, at its heart, is breaking a problem down into smaller and sub-problems until you reach something you know how to do. For example, take the new bar widget in Ren'Py 4.4. It does two things: Displays a bar on the screen, and allows the user to click on it. Displaying the bar required three steps. The first was to divide it into the left side and the right side, something that requires a wee bit of math. Then it needs to draw the left and the right halves of itself, and I knew how to do it, so displaying was done.

One determining factor as to how good a programmer you can be is how easily you can find the needle of important information out of the haystack of everything you know.