Got a question here from Dave Crew, Dave says “Roby, I got no knowledge of programming but I’d like to learn. Where would you recommend I start? What language would be good as a starting language? I know so little about programming. I don’t even know what I would use it for. You often talk about Bosch scripts on the show, would that be a good place to start?”
So Dave your question is pretty wide open because you don’t really know what you want to do with the programming. It sounds like you’re just looking for a bit of an adventure in challenging yourself. So it depends I guess whether you want these to be applications that you run into your computer or do you want these to be web-based applications which are nice. I like programming for the web because—then it’s a cross system compatible, very, very easy. So it really depends on what you want to do. If you want to get into—I mean because you’ve got no experience, no knowledge of programming you say, you kind of what to start with the basics. So if you’re going to look at the web end then I would start with basic HTML. But coding it like I actually understand how to create headers, how to create start with—let’s start with you know doing XML compliant carriage returns and actually formatting using CSS and things like that and then getting to tables, I think that’s a good starting place for HTML. And then once you’re good at tables, once you understand what a TR and a TD is and how they function and how you can make advanced tables with colspan and a rowspan. Once you get to that point then start looking at DIVs and SPANs and things like that. So get HTML under your belts then understand the output and then start working in a server sideline with something that’s going to interpret such as PHP which is my preferred language for web-based.
If on the other hand you’re not looking and going the web root and web being you know you’re not limited to just internet or web pages, I create a lot of applications that work for or run through PHP applications. But they’re actually run through Cron jobs. They run through Linux scripts and things like that. They actually are applications that run on the server or on the desktop. But if you’re looking to actually create GUI applications by graphically user interface applications like a program then you might look at let’s say C+ or C++, something that will allow you to create something that’s crossed platform compatibles and that if you want to try compiling it for Windows you can, if you want and try compiling it for Linux you can or Mac and just kind of play around with that. But I’m not a good resource for that because as you know I’m not a GUI programmer.
And then you got a question about Bosch, that’s kind of like the Linux equivalent and forgive me for being so lay terms for those of you who are in the know but Bosch is kind of like the Linux equivalent here Dave to what you would say DOS is to Windows. Its kind of like the black screen or you type in your command.
So a Bosch script is basically like the equivalent of a batch file in Windows or DOS. It’s basically like a list of commands that are bale to run through Bosch and so you can do a lot of really cool things. So it’s great for you know speeding up the processing of things that you do often. You know where you have to type in commands over and over and over again because you use it so often. I’ve made Bosch scripts even with our show every week. After the show’s broadcast I copied the AVI file actually and then I run this Bosch script on it that I created and it exports from the video every 15 seconds, it saves the screenshots. So that’s what you get the screenshots from the animated icon for each episode and things like that. So that’s automatically created using the Bosch scripts. So you can do some with that but it is strictly just the scripting language that is based on Bosch commands so things that you would type in the terminal site. That kind of idea but there are some events and things that you can do with that.
So it depends on where you want to go and what you want to do. If you want me to be able to helpful for you I think that the best thing for you to do is to look at web-based language because that’s my forte. But if you’re looking—there’s communities out there that are going to support any of those architectures and you’ll be able to find help with anything like that.
When I started programming I started thinking along these lines. I start to thinking what could I make of a program like what could I program that would be useful to either myself or to somebody else. Think of something that hasn’t been done or something that could speed things up for you. Is there something that you do on your computer that’s really not efficient right now that you’d like to do something to resolve? That maybe your starting place, that might be your deciding factor right there.
John is saying that it was also good to learn Java. And even in meeting that, I hate to say that but Java is a good language to learn. And I can see the advantage to using Java and that it is cross-platform compatible definitely. There’s a lot that you can do with it. And there’s you know there are good Java applications out there. So makes it easy for testing and things like that.
Albateller mentioned that if you learned programming basics with one such as C++ you can easily switch to the others later. And definitely true and that’s why I say start with HTML and then work your way to PHP because you learn the basics and then you can really excel at the other stuff. If you jump right in the PHP it’ll be extremely confusing because you don’t understand the base of the output which is HTML. Because what PHP sends to the browser is generally just HTML. So we want to understand the egg before the chicken, what came first, TML or PHP?
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services