Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Why I Hate Programming, Vol. 508

Take a look at this C++ tutorial I found.

It's bullshit.

Ninety percent of the time this is what a tutorial looks like for beginning programmers. A neat little list repeating all the great things you can do with the language, which happens to be a neat little list of things you can do with almost every language. It's worthless information, because none of it connects together.

What kinds of exercises do programmers do to memorize the different kinds of commands? Why can't anyone seem to write a simple, complete program that covers the basics?

An example: Usually there are a few things I'm looking to do. I want to know how to handle basic keyboard and mouse input. I want to throw a shape on the screen and move it around with that input. I want to put text where I want. I may even want to manipulate data.

I'm pretty sure there might be books out there with exactly what I want, but I haven't found them yet. The other frustration is that programming books are usually fifty bucks or more, and that's a helluva lot to spend on what eventually become sturdy doorstops.

Just a vent. Carry on.


lynx said...

you are right. I am an apprentice since september 2004 and still did not find a book which would cover the themes precisely or understandable. my job really sucks.

btw, the best programming language is QT, in my opinion and the best books are those of "addison wesly" and "o'reilly". that is it, nothing more, nothing less.

I think we have to wait for another ten or twenty years when programming will become easier; unfortunately the experts like it when others do not understand what they are talking about and how they actually got everything together.

Anonymous said...

The problem is that C++ isn't about Input and graphics, C++ is a programming language. If you want to know about Input and Graphics, that's an API issue and there is no standard.

If you want to know about Input and Graphics and speed is an issue, then you need to learn DirectX or OpenGL.

Squash Monster said...

As the other anonymous said, C++ isn't really going to do fancy input and graphics without some help. However, I'm going to recomend SDL instead of DirectX or OpenGL.

And one of the better tutorials I've run into for SDL is here:

Its approach is to show you a chunk of code that does some interesting stuff, explain anything relatively new that it does, and let you figure it out. It feels like there should be a better way, but in all my experience I've found that the best way to learn programming is by looking up or copy/pasting code you need until you have that memorized, then keeping that memorized until you have a fundamental understanding of what you're doing.

Anonymous said...

I found some critiques about c++ in OpenAsthra C/C++ Blogs