Programming - Advice?
 

Curious what the best avenue is to enter this field. Are there many freelance opportunities? Independent contracting? Remote opportunities? What sort of education is necessary? What sort is suggested? What are most popular languages? Which are most useful? Which most needed? What sort of drawbacks are there?

What else?

I'm where you are. Someone I work with (not directly) gave me the same advice I read in a C# and C++ book. Just program. Explore what you can do with it and don't give up.

Books are books, but you need to program in order to train your mind to think like a programmer. It's a way of thought, simply put.

Languages don't matter until later. I personally started with Basic back in the 80s.

my X point plan for success in the field: read a c# book, play a lot of videogames so you can type fast and look semicompetent, lie on your resume, lie in interviews, use performance-enhancing drugs for high pressure social situations, learn jedi mind tricks, have visible abs, learn statistics and use them to write reports so you can suck up to the execs, figure out the psychology of ppl who can remove technical responsibilities while increasing your pay and abuse it, convince everyone to love you

Haynar is a great person to engage! :)


HAYNAR! (On page 25 of the member list, under H)

Guess I was looking for something more tangible ^^; I dinked around in basic when I was little and did some C, but decided against pursuing it because while I had some fun with it, there were nerds who LOVED it and I didn't feel like investing the time to compete with that. Of course now I've invested more time in something I don't like at all, have no natural aptitude for and have only succeeded based on good impression, perceived potential and personality ^^; Maybe too late to change or may still not be my thing (my brain is prone to error and I am highly unobservant so I found debugging frustrating), was just curious ^^

Last thing I'll say is I personally like programming because in the career field you are inventing everything. Of course you face time lines and what not, but YOU are the creator. There is no SOP (standard operating procedures) to guide you through a boring process in which a monkey can do.

Most the time when you are given a project, your mind is your limit. MIS, in which I work right now, and have been for the last 20 years is freaking boring as shit. It's the same crap over and over.

edit:

The only thing that keeps you on your toes in MIS is security. How to make things more secure.....it's a constant struggle.

There's plenty of jobs for GOOD programmers in pretty much any language.

If you're new to it, I'd probably suggest trying out Javascript because you can get started really fast and need nothing but a web browser and notepad.

Varies based on lots of stuff, but if you want a generic answer, save up for some courses in a specific language such as C# .net and get certified. A certification is pretty much a guarantee that you'll get your foot in the door at the entry level.

Not really. I'm sure there is such a thing, but it's rare, and there's almost always going to be a contract involved if you find work with an actual company, which brings us to

which you more or less need a proven track record to find gainful work in. Independent contracting is something programming veterans will find success in because they'll have a desirable skillset and an extensive resume.

Another thing I wouldn't exactly count on at the entry level, or in general. If you're on salary you may be allowed to work remotely if you've proven reliable, but almost all companies are going to require a physical presence at a location at least some of the time, if not all of the time.

None.

Again varies based on lots of stuff. If you have a particular interest in one language, get a certification for that language. If you have a more generic interest in programming without a specific goal in mind then you might want to enroll in some college-level courses to learn the fundamentals and then find out what interests you from there.

C# .net and Java are really popular these days, and probably the only two I'd recommend for object-oriented programming. There's still huge value in learning C++, but if your primary concern is landing a job I'd worry about that later. JavaScript is also hugely valuable and definitely the most widely employed for web development.

Hard to say, and I'm probably not qualified to really expound on which languages excel at doing what, but I've seen programs consisting of a bunch of lua scripts compiled in C, such as Zaela's EQGExport, hugely outperform C# programs like Shendare's EQ-Zip. Drawbacks are mostly contingent on programming knowledge and skill level, and the better understanding you have of fundamental programming concepts the better you'll be able to utilize a language and write functional code.

You don't need to be an expert programmer to understand programming concepts. I've found it's easier to learn a language by researching how to do something specifically - I'll have a specific, simple idea in mind, and set about researching how to do that by performing a flurry of Google searches and by studying the code of software that might be instructive so as to achieve that goal. http://stackoverflow.com/

In regards to C# and C++:

If you learn C#, you'll learn C++ basically. The only difference is garbage collection and memory allocation with C++ that you don't get with C#. C# does those two for you, which has its goods and bads.

EDIT:

What CaveTroll says. Except I disagree. I've been a manager of Microsoft based systems for years. There is money in it (not the same as 10+ years ago). If you have a clean life style, go government. It's guarantied work and the pay isn't as low as commercial industry.