I am currently going to school for a CS degree and I was wondering what people would recommend doing to keep my programming skills up to date. I can only take about 2 classes a term and some of programming classes are really spread out making it hard to remember the basics. Any books that have good projects or tutorials? Just wanted to hear some suggestions from folks.
Thanks
The best way to keep sharp is to answer questions on this forum. Not only do you solidify what you already know by teaching it to others, you're also in a position to be corrected by extremely qualified programmers if you make a mistake.
I don't think any university or college will teach you C++ before making sure you know C well. So normally the first course is a C programming course.
One good book is K&R's "The C programming language", they'll probably give it to you as a required text. Another one is "C++ Primer", which doesn't require you to know C but it does require you to have programmed before.
Just curious what University are you going to?
>I don't think any university or college will teach
>you C++ before making sure you know C well.
The good ones probably will. C isn't a prerequisite for C++. In fact it's more likely to hinder budding programmers in learning C++ because the good habits in C suddenly become bad habits in C++.
>So normally the first course is a C programming course.
Normally the first course is Java, which is a shame.
>One good book is K&R's "The C programming language",
>they'll probably give it to you as a required text.
Sadly, I don't think your prediction is accurate. If they teach C, they're more likely to give you a crap book that poorly teaches an implementation-defined variation of C for the dinosaur of a compiler that they force you to use.
You seem to have had a really bad experience with your degree Narue.
The university that teaches C and Unix before anything else is CMU, and if you look for CMU in the US News website, its ranked No.1 with MIT.
I have a friend at CMU and they did give him that book and they use gcc compiler which lets you compile for alot of computer architectures and platforms. as opposed to the over-hyped Microsoft tools which lets you compile for, guess what, Microsoft only.
>You seem to have had a really bad experience with your degree Narue.
I don't have a degree. I'm going on my experience with helping and tutoring, and the horror stories I hear from those students.
>The university that teaches C and Unix before anything else is CMU
Please point out where I said that there are no exceptions.
>as opposed to the over-hyped Microsoft tools which
>lets you compile for, guess what, Microsoft only
If you use compiler extensions, you're stuck with that compiler. This is true for gcc as well.
RPI teaches C++ first and doesn't mention C until some classes involving lower-level details, where you're just expected to pick it up. That works fine.
And MIT starts off with Python...
and they use gcc compiler which lets you compile for alot of computer architectures and platforms. as opposed to the over-hyped Microsoft tools which lets you compile for, guess what, Microsoft only.
I'm not sure what you mean by "over-hyped Microsoft tools" in this context. I haven't seen any hype regarding microsoft's C compiler.
Another one is "C++ Primer", which doesn't require you to know C but it does require you to have programmed before.
do u have an ebook of that?? if yes please let me know..i want a copy..i will give u my id..
>do u have an ebook of that??
If he did it would probably be illegal to give you a copy. I'm not aware of that book being freely distributable.
If you want an ebook about c++, try downloading thinking in C++, you can get it here.
I've heard its good, but I haven't read it.
The reason I said over-hyped is that, a few days ago a friend of mine was using a class, and when he pressed '.', he didn't see the pop-up window to pick the members from, so he said: "that class has no members". that just made me think that after you depend on intellisense there is no going back. So maybe its not over-hyped but it just promotes bad thinking while writing code. Yet everybody runs to get the latest copy for no reason.
>that just made me think that after you depend on intellisense there is no going back.
That's probably true. Auto-completion is a useful tool, but it's also a good way to replace your brain cells with mushy goo if you're not careful. Of course, that's not a good argument against Microsoft because auto-completion is a desirable feature for any source code editor, and Microsoft isn't the only one that does it.
A much better argument is C++/CLI, which is a craptastic bastardization of C++ that takes C++ out of its niche areas and also fails to beat C# or VB.NET in the .NET arena.
>Yet everybody runs to get the latest copy for no reason.
The latest copy supposedly fixes the annoying bugs of the old version. There are new annoying bugs, but you don't know what they are yet. That's typical of every piece of software.
> everybody runs to get the latest copy for no reason
Someone wants latest version not for intellisense, but for updated compiler with bugs fixed, compatible with latest standards etc.
And I see no reason for being so Anti Intellisense. Its there for faster coding. Almost every good IDE for every language has this feature.
You may think so vishesh and narue, but I've seen people wanting it so badly for absolutely no reason, they don't have any problem with the old one, but they just want the latest version, because, well...its the latest.
Personally I like to ask my self what will this give me, then go get it, not the other way around.
Good point Narue, as if they didn't change c++ before, they decided to create their own crappy version which has .Net all over it.
>but they just want the latest version, because, well...its the latest.
I'm fine with bleeding edge people blazing the trail for me. Without early adopters, we wouldn't get the patches and updates required to make the software more stable and useful. Personally, I'm too cheap to go out and buy the newest thing unless there's significant benefit to me.
I don't think any university or college will teach you C++ before making sure you know C well. So normally the first course is a C programming course.
One good book is K&R's "The C programming language", they'll probably give it to you as a required text. Another one is "C++ Primer", which doesn't require you to know C but it does require you to have programmed before.
Just curious what University are you going to?
Going to Portland Community College to finish up prereqs, and to be honest the majority of my programming experience has been with C++.
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