Because technology should be the means, not the end.
When your opponent is hurrying recklessly, you must act contrarily and keep calm. You must not be influenced by the opponent. Train diligently to attain this spirit.
Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings
The question of what programming language to learn is a common one for beginners. Here are a couple things to consider when starting out.
An introduction to the Rogue C# series in which we’ll be designing a roguelike game closely based on the original Rogue and exploring how an application is designed from start to finish.
When you’re learning a new subject, there is no substitute for hands-on experience and this is especially true with programming. You can spend all the time you want reading about a programming language and seeing examples but until you get in there and figure something out for yourself, you’re not really learning anything. This is…
In my latest series of YouTube videos, I demonstrate how to program Conway’s Game of Life in C#. Although I try to provide as much explanation as I can during the videos, this series is probably best for beginners who already have already gotten their feet wet with things like variables and decision structures.
View the series “Programming Conway’s Game of Life in C#” on YouTube.
My latest online course on Teachable.com is about getting started with C# programming. Most of my previous video work has centered around Microsoft Access but I’ve produced a couple of other C# videos and, based on the reaction, I decided it was time to do some more with it.
I learned how to program many years ago because it seemed fun and I had ideas I wanted to develop. The basic idea behind this series, is that the best way to learn programming is by doing. I could write another language tutorials that takes people step-by-step through the parts of the language but there are already great tutorials like that out there.
One of the interesting features of C# is the ability to add custom user controls to your forms. If you have some specific functionality centered around a group of form controls that you use repeatedly, you can save it as a custom control in a class library and then add it to other applications. This…
My latest challenge to my database programming students was to create a C# class that would perform various number conversions, starting with Arabic numbers (0 to 3999) to Roman numerals and vice versa.
I required that all public functions in the class needed to be declared as static, so that they could be called from outside the class without having to create a new instance. Also, the class was to be completely portable; it must not use any functions such as message boxes that would prevent them from copying the entire class into any other type of project and referencing it. Of course, all code must also have error handling and commenting.
My students came up with various solutions and I think some had more help from StackOverflow than others. I know that one of them learned the hard way not to search for “XXX” on Google.
One popular strategy was to use the C# Dictionary class to hold the Roman characters and their equivalents. I don’t always get around to writing up my own solutions to these challenges before I assign them, so I happily swiped that strategy for my own code which was otherwise written from scratch. I ended up using the SortedDictionary class instead.
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