How can I get more programming experience [closed]

I am going to be a third year computer science student and I have read Head first Java, Head First C, and I am currently reading C++ which is the language that I like the most since it has a good teaching style for people with experience. I am planning to either learn to make software with QT, learn objective-C(for iphone), or read Effective C++.

How can I get experience as a programmer? Do I have the skills to join an open source project or do I need to learn php, mySQL or any other language. I love programming and computer science in general although some classes can be extremely hard (theoretical computer science). I also plan to become a guru in c++ but that’s not going to be anytime soon.

ABC – ALWAYS BE CODING. It’s really that simple. One of my favorite ways of getting to know a language is to write a toy interpreter for a subset of the language in the language itself or if that’s not your thing then maybe a ray tracer or something else that’s just big enough to be non-trivial but not so big that it can’t be finished in a month or so. The point is to work on something that will force you to look at the standard library and the data abstraction facilities that the language offers. Sometimes the project is a success sometimes it’s not but at the end of it I know enough about a language to know what its strengths and weaknesses are and whether I want to continue learning more. If it turns out that I like the language then every time I read an interesting paper or blog post I try to start a project in which I implement some of the ideas that were presented in the paper or the blog post. This way I’m always getting practice and learning new ideas so it sort of becomes a virtuous cycle.

Some projects that have worked really well for me in the past : interpreter for a subset of some language, ray tracer, PEG parser generator, HTTP header parser, simple echo client/server, twitter bot for automatically posting tweets from a queue, amazon product scraper to look for deals.

As nicely explained in Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years, you should follow next steps :

Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. Make
sure that it keeps being enough fun so that you will be willing to
put in your ten years/10,000 hours.
Program. The best kind of learning is learning by doing. To put it
more technically, “the maximal level of performance for individuals
in a given domain is not attained automatically as a function of
extended experience, but the level of performance can be increased
even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate
efforts to improve.” (p. 366) and “the most effective learning
requires a well-defined task with an appropriate difficulty level for
the particular individual, informative feedback, and opportunities
for repetition and corrections of errors.” (p. 20-21) The book
Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday
Life is an interesting reference for this viewpoint.
Talk with other programmers; read other programs. This is more
important than any book or training course.
If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate
school). This will give you access to some jobs that require
credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the
field, but if you don’t enjoy school, you can (with some dedication)
get similar experience on your own or on the job. In any case, book
learning alone won’t be enough. “Computer science education cannot
make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and
pigment can make somebody an expert painter” says Eric Raymond,
author of The New Hacker’s Dictionary. One of the best programmers I
ever hired had only a High School degree; he’s produced a lot of
great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock
options to buy his own nightclub.
Work on projects with other programmers. Be the best programmer on
some projects; be the worst on some others. When you’re the best, you
get to test your abilities to lead a project, and to inspire others
with your vision. When you’re the worst, you learn what the masters
do, and you learn what they don’t like to do (because they make you
do it for them).
Work on projects after other programmers. Understand a program
written by someone else. See what it takes to understand and fix it
when the original programmers are not around. Think about how to
design your programs to make it easier for those who will maintain
them after you.
Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Include one
language that supports class abstractions (like Java or C++), one
that supports functional abstraction (like Lisp or ML), one that
supports syntactic abstraction (like Lisp), one that supports
declarative specifications (like Prolog or C++ templates), one that
supports coroutines (like Icon or Scheme), and one that supports
parallelism (like Sisal).
Remember that there is a “computer” in “computer science”. Know how
long it takes your computer to execute an instruction, fetch a word
from memory (with and without a cache miss), read consecutive words
from disk, and seek to a new location on disk. (Answers here.)
Get involved in a language standardization effort. It could be the
ANSI C++ committee, or it could be deciding if your local coding
style will have 2 or 4 space indentation levels. Either way, you
learn about what other people like in a language, how deeply they
feel so, and perhaps even a little about why they feel so.
Have the good sense to get off the language standardization effort as
quickly as possible.

I’d suggest you train yourself by effectively writing functional programs. Take a bigger project once you think you’ve got the basics. Learn the qt framework for software development and keep practicing. The best way to learn to program is by actually writing code.

I’d say reading also plays an important role, you could look for a team of developers who are hosting an open source project (Look for one on github, or other similar sites) because they could offer you valuable team development experience.

Sometimes places like sourceforge are a bit daunting at first. A really nice way to find something to do, is trawl through the issue trackers of projects and find a bug/issue you like the sound of fixing.

On some small scale github projects this becomes much more accessible. You effectively have a direction and a purpose in trying to grok the code, instead of wading through it blindly.

The samples in the books or the assignments at the university are good starting points to understand how the programming works and they show the possibilities for your future projects.

Work on real projects

But without a real project experience, you tend to forget the things you learned.

Problems are opportunities to show what you can

Additionally you see in are real project how complex the requirements can be and you expreince hard to knock problems. These Problems are opportunities to show what you can. You can see your weak sides that you should improve.

do I need to learn php, mySQL or any other language.

Yes sir, please consider the languages of the world wide web.
HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.

Here is why:

They are quick to learn, and increasingly rich to implement.
They no longer just write web, but os, server and, database as well.
Most Importantly *

They are now being used to re-define Computer Science 101 – by the creator of jQuery, John Resig.

Don’t shoot the messenger, just check this link to khan school academy.

c/c++/c# design patterns transfer to JS there.

Hope that helps.

Filed under: softwareengineering - @ 09:40

Thẻ: c++, experience, qt

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How can I get more programming experience [closed]