I just uploaded my final, looking forward to some self-study this summer.

Is it just me or does using .Net feel like baking a cake with a cake mix? Sure, it may be harder to do from scratch, but at least then you'd know exactly what all of the ingredients are.

If you do program for a living, how did you first learn? How many languages do you know?

There are 10 types of people in the world; those that understand Binary and those that don't.


Nuff Said.

Exactly!

I'm currently earning my living as an Android developer. I know a bunch of languages, but none as well as Java. I'm entirely self-taught. (Well, not quite entirely; I was taught Logo when I was in grade school, but then lost interest in programming until high school.)

Lately I've been setting up to learn how to program the Arduino. Its language is kind of like C. So far I've only designed and programmed a very simple blinking LED circuit. I've been gutting old printers for parts. My next goal is to drive a stepper motor.

Let's all go back to assembler

The cool thing about .Net it that you can use a cake mix (like LINK to SQL), or you could buy some flour and use your own recipe (like SqlDataReader), or you could grind your own flour and open a socket to the database on port 1433.

There have always been libraries that you could use for free, or purchase and you might not get very far without them. I would not have written MicroBot if .Net did not have a Socket class.

Yeah, but you knew assembler first, right? I understand some universities are still teaching assembler, but not my local community college.

The grades are in, I passed .Net OOP! SQL and mobile apps next fall, .Net APX next spring. By the time I get a degree I'll be drawing Social Security! LOL

Congrats Cruncher.
I know how difficult it can be.

My wife is taking a programming class in the Fall for her major.

Thank you!

There are so many free online classes offered my prestigious universities today. I watched all the lectures for Harvard's CS50. I've signed up for another intro to programming class that starts the first of June offered by udacity. https://www.udacity.com/course/cs046

MIT also has an intro to computer programming course, but it started before my term ended. I'll have to try to catch the next one. www.edx.org has a lot of free online classes from large universities as well. Some of them are even starting to offer real college credit (for a small fee, usually $150).

From what I'm understanding, of those who are interested in learning programming 75% drop before completing. I'll have to admit, there were times when I felt as if I was being vetted, but I'm a stubborn old Irish woman who's not afraid to ask questions and stay after class for extra lab time.

I programmed in gw-basic and dec-basic before assembler. I wasn't able to do much in assembler, and I don't feel that it helped me when learning other languages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_assembly_language.

If you look at the sample code, you can see that a simple c++ printf "Hello World!" required about a dozen lines of code in DOS, and a few more than that in Windows. You entire assembler program would be less than 200 bytes when compiled, but the c++ version would be ~ 5,000 - 60,000 bytes depending on the compiler.

I know I should be grateful for jumping into programming at this point, now that there are .Net libraries and I don't have to "reinvent the wheel" every time I need to do something. I still feel however that I'm missing a level of deeper understanding that you guys have who began much earlier.

Things were smaller back then. DOS had a couple hundred files, and I knew what every one of them did. Windows has hundreds of thousands of files.

What is your preferred method of data storage? I guess that would depend on the application though, wouldn't it?

It drove me nuts when the instructor would have make a win form, but the data was stored only in RAM when it should have been in a dbase, and we already knew how to use xml files.

I've been "introduced" to saving data as text, xml, accessdb, & SQL.

My guess is that most data today is in SQLServer files?

That's the problem with school, they don't teach you what you will need in real life.

My website is stored in SQL (Even the static content). SQL is huge though. For a local program, I would use LINQ to XML. For a distributed application, I would use a web service to connect to SQL.

And now there's NoSQL (or NOSQL, "Not Only SQL") databases supporting the buzzword ju jour, Big Data.