Can I learn rudimentary programming from a book?

[dbot]

NJ5 said:

Rpruett said:
I would start with C++. C is too cryptic in many ways and can be a hassle. Java is to abstracted from the actual machine IMO.

C++ will give you an easy introduction and understanding into what you're doing. As you grow with C++, you will be able to handle Java or most of what you want with relative ease.

That doesn't make sense. As other posters have said, C is essentially a subset of C++.  If you know C++ you know C too.

 

Many c++ programers actually program in C.  As someone mentioned earlier, object oriented programming is a great way to create self-documenting code, but it really is a waste of resources.

 

"(Lie #2) Code should be designed around a model of the world

There is no value in code being some kind of model or map of an imaginary world. I don't know why this one is so compelling for some programmers, but it is extremely popular. If there's a rocket in the game, rest assured that there is a "Rocket" class (Assuming the code is C++) which contains data for exactly one rocket and does rockety stuff. With no regard at all for what data tranformation is really being done, or for the layout of the data. Or for that matter, without the basic understanding that where there's one thing, there's probably more than one.

Though there are a lot of performance penalties for this kind of design, the most significant one is that it doesn't scale. At all. One hundred rockets costs one hundred times as much as one rocket. And it's extremely likely it costs even more than that! Even to a non-programmer, that shouldn't make any sense. Economy of scale. If you have more of something, it should get cheaper, not more expensive. And the way to do that is to design the data properly and group things by similar transformations."

-- http://www.insomniacgames.com/tech/articles/0308/three_big_lies.php