Working smarter: Learning a programming language

From my experience, web designers fall into three distinct camps. The first is the graphic designer turned web designer. They have the fundamentals of page layout, an eye for detail and a strong grasp of design consistency and typographical techniques. The graphical web designer will more than likely be able to build a website in HTML, will have an intermediate knowledge of Flash animation and will get around this format using the timeline and visual tweening. Some will have a clear grasp of using style sheets and producing HTML markup which is both semantic and standards compliant. This is the camp I grew up in.

The second camp are the computer science graduates cum web designer. Normally taught web development during studying and have a strong understanding of object orientated programming, building semantic websites with HTML and style sheets and probably an open source language such as PHP.

The third camp are the self taught. They have learnt HTML and CSS off their own backs and not content with this they are hungry for more teaching themselves around graphic packages such as Photoshop and Illustrator while also dabbling in the server side programming. This is the camp I established myself in. I am in this camp at the moment. I do not wish to leave this camp for another.

There are of course some cross over and lines get blurred. I for one studied graphic communication but self taught everything web related.

We have here a wide spectrum of people that work with the web. Those that have logical minds and those that have creative minds with everything else in between. Is it possible to develop your mindset from a far more creative side to both a logical side too? This is currently what I am trying to do. To further my progression I wish to learn an object orientated language, my weapon of choice is C#. I have attempted this before but found the books I tried to learn from too much of a learning curve and demanded some prior knowledge of programming. I have now found a book that I would recommend for fledgling programmers with no previous knowledge. Visual C# Step by step, Microsoft Press. It has eased me in with the makeup of the language and familiarised the syntax in easy to understand examples. However, approaching the third section of the book I found that with the shear amount of information that I was taking in with the read so far I was unable to remember everything and then trying to look up how a particular method conducted itself quickly while following the later chapters became difficult. Instead of plodding on I began searching around the web for cheat sheets. There are some decent cheat sheets out there, but with such a sheet not everything will be detailed and of course it is all very cut down. Next I tried printing off the summaries of each chapter in the book. This wasn’t particularly manageable either. Instead, now I have begun rereading parts of the chapters and writing up C# documents with my own commenting and examples of how each method/function/whatever works. Each item is given it’s own document and saved under the name of the element I am describing. This has built up a library of easily referable documents I can call upon while reading the book and following examples.

This will be of use to others in my position so I will be making this library readily available once completed. It should be a good alternative to cheat sheets and provide just that little bit more scope when trying to learn not only a new programming language, but a new way of thinking.

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Tags: birminghamuk, c#, object orientated programming, oop, Web design, working smarter

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2008 at 10:50 pm and is filed under Web design, Web development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.