Best online programming courses

[madknight3]

As far as I know myself I don't work the best with books because I usually get to results on very weird way. It just clicks . So I thought that online courses will be good for me because I mostly get stuff if someone gives it to me. If I have to read book I'm much slower . Does anyone know any book that have only examples in it?

 

I would still give books a chance, but like you, I also enjoy online courses as well. I just haven't taken any for Java so I wouldn't know exactly which ones to recommend. There are so many options out there but I'll provide some of my thoughts.

 

Paid sites like PluralSight and Lynda.com (offer code wanshow) tend to have pretty good tutorials and they both have Java tutorials. They also both have free trials you can use to start learning. You might even be able to finish the whole course in the free trial and then cancel before they charge you anything.

 

I've seen CaveOfProgramming recommended by others for it's Java tutorials. His beginner Java course is also on Udemy which has received a lot of positive reviews.

 

Tutorialspoint can be useful to reference but I would use other resources as my primary means of learning. The same goes for the official Java documentation.

[Art Vandelay]

there are a lot of bad books out there that are best avoided

Such as anything by Herbert Schildt

 

here's a quote from his book "C: The complete reference" page 174:

a structure declaration is a statement

How does that even make it past editing?

 

For you a large part of your learning is just diving in head first and learning as you go. If that's what works for you, great. I don't think that's the best course of action for most beginners though.

Yeah, I wouldn't really recommend it unless this is your normal method of learning new skills.

 

Getting something like GDB and watching what happens when the code executes seems like it would be really good for learning. I wish I knew about GDB or my University's free Visual studio licenses when I was learning. I guess learning how to debug things without a debugger turned out to be a very useful skill in the workplace though.

[SSL]

How does that even make it past editing?

 

I don't get it.

 

Getting something like GDB and watching what happens when the code executes seems like it would be really good for learning. I wish I knew about GDB or my University's free Visual studio licenses when I was learning. I guess learning how to debug things without a debugger turned out to be a very useful skill in the workplace though.

 

Sounds like your school wasn't any good. Didn't they have you take a systems course?

[Art Vandelay]

I don't get it.

It's just a completely wrong assertion, and it's made pretty obvious in the BNF of C.

 

if you do 

case 1:int test;

It'll refuse to compile, for example

 

 

Sounds like your school wasn't any good. Didn't they have you take a systems course?

It was an ECE course. All of my courses except the math ones are.

 

the rationale was that we should learn how to program via the command line... which doesn't make that much sense when you're dealing with something that relies as heavily on API calls as C#.

[SSL]

the rationale was that we should learn how to program via the command line... which doesn't make that much sense when you're dealing with something that relies as heavily on API calls as C#.

 

Does programming on the command line preclude using gdb somehow? I did all my coding in a headless vm for my systems class.

[Art Vandelay]

 

Does programming on the command line preclude using gdb somehow? I did all my coding in a headless vm for my systems class.

The school is paid by Microsoft to teach C# as far as I know, and if there is a command line C# debugger they didn't tell us about it.

 

C# is a pretty awful starting language, IMO.

[madknight3]

the rationale was that we should learn how to program via the command line... which doesn't make that much sense when you're dealing with something that relies as heavily on API calls as C#.

 

The school is paid by Microsoft to teach C# as far as I know, and if there is a command line C# debugger they didn't tell us about it.

 

It would be interesting to hear their reasons for these kind of choices. My university did a similar thing. It started us with Java in a Linux environment. No mention of IDE's or debuggers. Just a basic text editor and the terminal. I used gedit for a long time before even finding out there were better things out there to program with. It worked out fine I suppose, but being taught to use a debugger early on would have been nice. So many print statements...so many...

 

C# is a pretty awful starting language, IMO.

 

No matter which language is picked people will complain about it - be it C#, Python, C, Java, or whatever. Each have their pros and cons but they will all get you started in programming.

[Art Vandelay]

No matter which language is picked people will complain about it - be it C#, Python, C, Java, or whatever. Each have their pros and cons but they will all get you started in programming.

 

I just felt like being forced to use OO before I knew to program was really confusing. I don't think anything's really wrong with the language, other than the lack of macros; I just think starting with a language that allows you to avoid all of these complex constructs is a better choice. c++ did it really well, allowing you to completely avoid classes, polymorphism, pointers, etc. before you're ready.