Re: [OT] A question for programmers - Inspiration
On Thursday 20 March 2003 21:30, Barry deFreese wrote:
>
> Thank you for the advice it is much appreciated. I should have gone a
> little futher in my background. I have done quite a bit of
> "programming". I learned FORTRAN/77, Basic on VMS, and Cobol on VMS in
> college. I have written in VB, VBScript, JavaScript. In fact part of
> my "job" today is writing Active Server Pages. So I have some of the
> "concepts" down to a degree. I will definetely check into the books and
> such you have suggested. However, two of my fundamental problems are
> thus: I don't learn a great deal from reading unfortunately. I am
> pretty much a hands on guy with a background in networking and
> infrastructure stuff. Two ( too Chad's point ) the problem is, is that
> when I have an enlightenment, I guess I get intimidated because the
> things that I want to do are well above my skillsets. I want to write
> kernel level stuff when I'm lucky to write my name!! :-) (Somewhat of a
> chicken before the egg type of syndrome I suppose). I don't want to
> walk into flying, I want to fly into flying!! :-)
>
in my experience as a programmer each time I truly learned something and
reached that next plateau it was because something in work or hobby forced me
to stretch that extra mile. Sometimes it is like having your bones broken so
they can reset properly -- it always hurts and scares you. Then suddenly --
WHAMO -- the next time you are confronted with a big problem it does not seem
as big.
programming is like growing up. You crawl, then stumble, then walk and
finally you run. Sometimes you learn to swim or mountain climb and these
seem unrelated. Then the extra muscle / tone / fitness you gain helps you
out in other ways.
In physical engineering if you mess up you may destroy precious materials or
otherwise impact the world. With a computer the only real cost is time.
Remember, we learn more from our mistakes than our triumphs. Skin a knee,
scrape your knuckles, break a bone. You'll be a better programmer for it.
Finally I would like to comment on the book recommendations. These are spot
on. If you look at the collections of people who have programmed for a while
and take it seriously they tend to have books about thought processes, the
act of programming and the like. These often outnumber the language specific
texts 2 or 3 to 1.
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