http://www.borland.com/bcppbuilder/freecompiler/
Apparently Borland is giving away their compiler. Who woulda thunk?
http://www.borland.com/bcppbuilder/freecompiler/
Apparently Borland is giving away their compiler. Who woulda thunk?
This generally ends up in a disaster. Why are you trying to teach a newbie two things at the same time when he doesn’t know any? Let him learn how to walk before learning how to run.
IMO, this is very, very, very bad. The idea of doing your own garbage collection is a burden that’s a legacy from C. It really is unnecessary unless you are doing system level work. There are huge amounts of problems with teaching C to a newbie; I had a 4 month running debate with another person. He left the debate at the end, but came back one year later to tell me that I was right. To summarise my point it is paramount to teach good programming practices initially, and C unfortunately allows all sorts of bad crap to occur (not to mention the unsafe library calls). It will take years to get rid of bad habbits, if they can be at all corrected.
I will say Smalltalk is even better, but it is not widely available.
Urban Ranger: With regards to the OO vs. non-OO program comparison, the best answer I can give you is that that’s how I learned to program, and it worked for me. I think it helps to see exactly what it means for a program to be object-oriented. Of course, there’s a huge YMMV attached to this.
As for garbage collection…I think it’s good to know what it is and how to do it well even if you rarely use it. Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
Smalltalk is an interesting language, although I’ve never had a chance to play with it.
My advice is to avoid anything “Visual.” I would recommend starting with command-line programs because they tend to be a lot more straight-forward and easier to debug. When you try to learn using one of the “Visual” there are usually too many things interacting, and if something goes wrong, too many paths to check to find the problem.
JOhn.
EagleEye,
Since you’re using this to try out the concept, I would go with Visual Basic as a first choice, Java as #2. Avoid C and C++ at this point. I’ve programmed in all of the above, and I agree with everyone who says that the future is Java and OO. However, for quick results that look professional, VB is much easier. When I program for myself recreationally (pathetic, isn’t it?), I use VB. IMO, OO really only pays dividends on fairly large projects.
As far as pricing goes, VB 6.0 has several different versions. There is a standard edition (may be called “Learning”) for about $100. Professional is about $400, Enterprise is close to $1000. Less publicized is the “Academic” version, which includes the Professional features, but costs about $100 to students. If you can buy this through a college, look into it. 6.0 is not the latest (.NET version just came out), but I don’t know the newest pricing.
I don’t know any current VB books, but I recommend Cay Horstmann’s “Core Java” books should you choose that direction.
TLB
I suggest taking a programming fundamentals course before jumping into any one particular language. These courses typically last 8-12 weeks and will give you a good foundation with which to work from.
Why not Delphi? It’s a RAD (rapid application development) environment like VB, but it’s based on a much better language than Basic.
It’s much easier for me to teach newbies OO than procedural programming. OO is more natural to those who haven’t programmed before.
Indeed that can be quite true, though I think this is one of the advanced topics that should be addressed later.
Based on my fellow students, that doesn’t seem to be true, but many of them might have had some kind of procedural language before.
do a search for lcc you’ll get some of the functionality of a real compiler from that