7 replies to this topic

[EvilDread]

Hey All!

Was looking for a place to get back into coding and stumbled upon this place... Seems pretty active.

I used to code in Perl and VB as well web design (HTML/CSS and PHP)


Haven't done any real coding in a few years, so i'm hoping to pickup on a new language..
Java maybe?


Anyways, Thought I would introduce myself.
If anyone has any tips on what I should start back with, i'm all open!


-Evil

[Alexander]

Hello EvilDread, on behalf of our community we say welcome!

Moving from VB and Perl to something newer such as Java would be a great movement. Java is a byte-code language, and contains a lot of libraries where something such as C/C++ would not.

Alexander.

[EvilDread]

I tried C/C++ once before when I was younger and tried getting into it.. It was also around the time when other things became more important...

I may very well pickup on C/C++
As it's been quite some time i'll need to get back into knowing what's needed..
Like, what should I use to code with (Editors) which compilers would be good, etc...

Should I carry on the discussion about that in this thread or ask over in the C++ forum?

[Alexander]

Here or in General Programming may be appropriate, although I can try to answer those.

If you are going the C/C++ route many people use either Visual Studio (Microsoft-only) or better the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). On Windows you can try MinGW (Minimalist GNU for Windows) of which is a port of it, and can compile native Windows applications. Microsoft has their own dialect for C++ called Visual C++ (VC++) that can allow better integration with .NET framework. You may want to move in to C# if you are going to use VC++ however, as it could be easier and they are both already platform dependent.

Ignoring .NET, You can use libraries such as WxWidgets, fltk, Qt and GTKmm if GUIs are important to you in plain portable C++.

If you are going the Java route you may have to download JRE (runtime) and JDK (development kit). For IDEs, Eclipse is the free and heavily featured option. It has many syntax checking options and features that you may find productive, including I believe RAD form designers. Netbeans is a little lighter and has a form designer for Java, including most other features. JEdit is a more general editor that supports many languages (I can hear another member, WingedPanther typing away at his computer about it to you), for anything other than Java I'd use Geany personally as it is lightweight enough with syntax highlighting.

Other than Geany it is mostly personal preference, however there are not too many IDEs that come out of mind for general languages and none can really do the best for "everything", I tend to stick with gVIM if working on more than one language. Eclipse actually has a CDT version of itself for C/C++?, that can be fairly feature-full (code analysing and etc.)

Feel free to look at some of those options, maybe I could answer some specifics while I am here.

Edited by Alexander, 14 December 2011 - 06:47 PM.
added information regarding cross platform GUI libraries

[EvilDread]

I think i'm leaning more towards C/C++. One of the things i've always been more curious about getting into. I'll definitely check out Geany as well.

Hopefully it won't take that long to get back into the whole coding scene, actually looking forward to it =Þ

[Alexander]

I am sure you'll pick it up fast. Always feel free to post in General Programming (non-language specific algorithms, theory, etc.) or in the C/C++ area for anything. We always welcome beginning questions of all sorts.

We also have a user contributed tutorial section, some of it may be a little hard to get in to if it is your first look at C++ however. The C/C++ forum has as sticky of resources (books, web pages, links) that can help you learn.

Alexander.

[WingedPanther]

Welcome aboard!

[fread]

Welcome to codecall EvilDread!