Old Coder Needs Help (Out of practice)

[Xoteo]

Greetings,

Originally, I graduated from college with a Computer Programmer degree; later I went on to university to pursue a bachelors in computer science. Unfortunately, when I had completed my studies, the requirement for that type of knowledge in my area had gone from great to almost nil. We coders were a dime a dozen. As it turns out, I was unable to find employment, slowly stopped writing code and eventually sought alternate employment.

The long and short of it is: I'm now an electrician and haven't written a single line of code in what is getting close to 10 years.

But I now suddenly feel the need to code again. I miss it. Recently, while playing a game (which will remain unnamed for now) I decided that with the help of a well written applet, I could improve my use of the game's player based market or Auction house.

Having played WoW and other MMOs and seen what people have done with the LUA that was made available to them, I was witness to some great add-ons, such as Autioneer and Auctionator for WoW. (Naming those ones specifically seems best since WoW had or has the largest player base)

Anyway. I'd like to create a similar program for this game I am playing. The auction for the game itself can actually be accessed over the web. And from what I can tell, they use javascript.

What I would like to do is create a program capable of acquiring information from this site. Loading into a database, then sorting it in ways that I deem necessary. Such as finding a median, or items being undersold for too cheap, etc. Basically something to help me find good things for cheap, or to help keep myself from being cornered out of a market that I am trying to dominate.

So I am requesting that someone, with much experience, or at least the necessary knowledge; help me get started on this project. I can't even remember the important first steps to take when starting a project. Such as creating the necessary header files, working on class variables that I figure I'd need to use. And other useful steps.

They say coding is like riding a bike, and if you can speak the logic then you can eventually learn all the languages. However right now this bike feels pretty broken =[

I downloaded Visual Express from microsoft and I thought I'd be able to just jump right in like when I had first started. But instead I stare at it with a forlorn expression going "damn, I'm intimidated."

I was considering writing the program in something simple like Visual C#.

I used to use a program called Code Blocks for much of my programming. I downloaded that and just confused the shit out of myself instead... It's like I just need a helping hand to start me going and my feet will remember their places.

If anyone is interested in helping me take on this project, I will be willing to share more information with them.

Thanks,

Xoteo

[Kekke]

Sounds interesting, what game is it about?

[pseudorandom21]

I highly recommend Microsoft Visual Studio Express, which is free.
http://www.microsoft.com/express

Now-a-days with uber-high-level languages like C# and VB that include a "forms designer" you don't have to code the main window and buttons, etc. yourself, they are called "controls" and VS will allow you to drag-and-drop them using the forms designer.

Of course there is still a lot of use for actual coding knowledge, but you might start with some youtube videos about using the Visual Studio forms designer with C# and then progress to writing a lot more code. A simple example would involve making a new C# "Windows Forms Application" and adding a "Button" control from the Visual Studio "Toolbox" window to the form, and then handling the button's "Click" event, to run some code.

Presumably you've already read about C# and it's high level features like garbage collection and the .NET framework, so I would say it's best to write some small applications to start with.

In a short time (for someone with prior coding experience), you'll be able to write some clever applications that do high-level stuff. C# is one of the better high-level languages in my opinion. Happy coding!