Ground level learning

My job has begun the transition of having me work more in software development and less with product support which I have been doing for most of my time while being there.  This is an advantage for me since programming was my college major.  Sure I dabbled in programming from time-to-time while at work, but the projects were very small in scope and served as a solution for very niche tasks.  So they were nothing worth bragging home about.

The programming language I’m most familiar with is Visual Basic, and sure, some of you are probably snickering about that, but it was a popular language to learn at the time when I was in college.  Windows computers dominated the PC landscape, and with VB's focus on rapid application development, it made it all the more tempting to learn, especially when it came to creating graphical form applications.

When I needed to get back into programming for those minor projects I mentioned earlier, I needed a quick intro course to get me back into the swing of things, and that’s when I found Patrice Pelland’s series of books tilted Build a Program Now!  I got the Visual Basic edition and it is basically a crash course on learning the basic syntax of the language, a tour on the development environment, and shows off some new tricks for the -- at the time -- latest version of the language had to offer.  It’s a fantastic book that includes great examples of practice projects from building your own web browser, to dealing with references, to database handling, to pulling information from the web.  Of course keep in mind it’s a crash course book so it’s not a detailed, all-encompassing book, but as reading material to quickly get you going, it’s totally the book to get.  I liked it so much that I got both editions that came out for Visual Basic.

Since graduating from college, C# (pronounced “C Sharp”) took over for VB as Microsoft’s programming language of choice.  It’s been something I’ve wanted to learn for a while, but never had a reason to learn it.  A few years back I tried to get into it when I bought a book on developing XNA games called Learn Programming Now! Microsoft XNA Studio 4.0 (boy, I guess the people at Microsoft Press really liked using that same color theme over and over again for this series of books) which used C#, but as I began reading the book, Microsoft announced they were going to begin sunsetting the whole indie project and were going to shut down the community sites.  Hearing this really took the winds out of my sails and I just stopped reading the book; which in hindsight I kind of regret doing.

But now for the current project I’m working on I realized I needed to build the software with C#, so it became a worthy excuse for needing to learn the language, and fast.  Luckily Pelland wrote a C# version of Build a Program Now! so I bought that to get up to speed with the syntax.  For me personally, C# is a little trickier to learn, but that may be due to the fact that I’m coming from a VB frame of mind, so it could be hindering my learning that language than if I hadn’t already knew VB.  But I’m getting there and the project is coming along.

It is cool, though, getting back into programming.  I should try reading that XNA book again to balance some fun stuff with the business side, even though Microsoft doesn’t allow games to be published to XBLA or to build games for the 360.  At least I can still build games for the PC!

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