What programming language should I teach myself?
Monday, August 30th, 2010 at
2:54 pm
I have only VERY basic skills – a bit of Fortran I’ve forgotten and some Basic on a commodore 64 (I made it up to sprite collisions!)
My goal is to write freeware games like Bridge Construction or a entrepreneur sim.
I need: Easy to learn, Free or Cheap, Easy to learn. 
Tagged with: language • myself • programming • Should • teach
Filed under: Entrepreneur Skills
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java….its the new revulation of programming and its fairly easy for an object orientated language
well, you don’t need programming knowledge to write freeware games. Go check out ScummVM at SourceForge (see source)
If you do want to learn a language, start with C. Plenty of free compilers out there and it’s not as hard as most would have you believe.
Java is NOT a good suggestion. It’s hardly a revolution considering its age. Furthermore, the only games I’ve ever seen written in Java are web-based.
Go for visual basic or java or flash with action script…
JAVA is a good choice, especially since Sun is releasing it into the OpenSource community. JAVA applications tend to work cross-platform (on all of the major operating systems). C++ would be the next suggestion that I have. I have worked for companies that use scripting languages like SCUMM and have found them too limiting.
I would start learning C++ first then JAVA. C builds the core to most of the other langauages you will want. VB, NET, JAVA etc. Do not do both together however as you can confuse the sytext very easily.
You can spend hours de-bugging what looks correct but it is in the wrong language.
Carl
Basic on a Commodore 64–what fun those days were! My advice for an easy-to-learn, easy-to-use language: JavaScript (ECMA script). In IE, it is known as JScript. All you need is a web browser and a text editor (so you can simply use IE or Firefox and something like Notepad or vi) to code and run scripts. Once you are familiar with JavaScript on the client (browser) side, you might want to try applying it to the server side via ASP.NET or the older version of ASP. Also, there are other non-Microsoft application servers that will allow you to implement apps in JavaScript. Other fun uses of JavaScript include AJAX applications and SVG applications. SVG would be a very good choice for the bridge construction sim.
Doesn’t really matter, once you learn one, the logical is similar, all you’ll need is the syntax.
http://www.cprogramming.com, http://www.programmingtutorials.com, http://www.gamedev.net, http://www.programmersheaven.com
for free resources, lib, compilers…etc http://www.thefreecountry.com
This should give you a good start,
if you start c++ I’d recommend bloodshed dev-c++
if java, netbeans, http://java.sun.com/