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I study software engineering and i dont know too much about web so i'm looking to learn a bit about web design and i find bootstrap a nice and easy way to do it, im looking to build a system similar to Moodle but way more simple.
I want to make a system where there's an administrator that registers the teachers and the students, you assing a teacher to a student and both of them are capable of leaving messages to each other.
If there is already something close to an open source project alike, i would like you to let me know :), if not, i'd like some advice about this, thank you!
Edit: I think i may be using MySQL for the DataBase :)
I am not sure what's available open-source wise as a compete project but if you want to learn, then why not start from scratch and build it.
I recently discovered the Roda framework. It's very powerful but also very simple : here is a project I did to play around. https://github.com/brentgreeff/flatten
There are some links in the readme to learn from. If this is new to you, then you will need to spend a lot of time on it, but you will learn a huge amount. Will totally pay off if you persevere.
Lastly, consider this. Your talking about concepts like : Student and Teacher. What makes a Student different from a teacher? Is it possible that a Student could also teach someone or that a Teacher could be a Student to someone else?
I recommend that you write tests which explain what the user is going to do, i.e. Define the user journeys, rather than starting with database tables.
I'm having a bit of an overload of information these past two days.
I'm planning to start my own website that will allow local businesses to list their items on sale, and then users can come in and search for "Abercrombie t-shirt" and the stores that sell them will be listed.
It's a neat little project I'm really excited for and I'm sure it'll take off, but I'm having problems from the get go.
Sure I could use ASP.Net for it, I'm a bit familiar with it and the IDE for ASP.Net pages is bar-none, but I feel this is a great chance for me to learn something new to branch out a bit and not regurgitate .NET like a robot.
I've been looking and asking around but it's all just noise and I can't make an educated decision.
Can you help me choose a framework/platform that will make me learn something that's a nice thing to know in the job market, but also nice for me to grow as a professional?
So far I've looked at:
Ruby on Rails
Kohana
CakePHP
CodeIgniter
Symfony
But they are all very esoteric to me, and I have trouble even finding out which IDE to use to that will let me use auto-complete for the proprietary keywords/methods.
Thank you for your time.
Have you considered ASP.NET MVC?
You will learn MVC architecture and client-side programming with javascript and jQuery, in a nimble platform that produces clean markup. If you are used to ASP.NET, you will be surprised at the clarity of design.
The NerdDinner tutorial is the go-to guide for getting started.
I suggest you try the whole Java eco-system.
Both similar and different to the .NET world, a lot of open-source frameworks.
Eclipse is a very good free IDE.
Also, why not go with GWT for the client side ?
In any case - enjoy !
Because nobody's mentioned it yet, I'm gonna have to suggest Rails.
I'm sure you're going to hear arguments for each framework you mentioned (and probably some you didn't), but I"ll be brief and explain why I got into Rails, having tried several of the others in your list:
It's beautiful. Coding in Ruby actually makes me happy. I find that I'm removed from a lot of tedium I've come to associate with large projects, and it's totally changed my coding career - I would literally hate to think how much less content of a programmer I'd be had I not taken the plunge. My only suggestion here would be to just try it.
Besides the succinctness of Ruby, Rails got me thinking in a more modular, logical and maintainable manner. As well as the great community, I really subscribe to the principles Rails stands for (especially the emphasis on DRY code), but all of the frameworks you mentioned have their recognized (and controversially disputed) pros and cons.
Each one is both similar and unique in varying degrees and aspects, and ultimately it's up to you to decide - Do some research; deliberate as to whether you're looking for huge libraries, a strong community, cutting-edge updates or assurances in tight documentation. Figuring out what you hope to gain from a framework is a great way of choosing the right one. But you should go for Rails anyway ;P
Good luck!
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I've been coding since my early teenager years. I started out with HTML, went on to PHP/MySQL (created my own forums, social networking sites, etc..) and then branched out into more traditional languages such as Java and C++ (also picked up a little VB .NET in high school). I'm most familiar now with C++ as that is the language of choice taught to us in Computer Science II (skipped Comp Sci I) at RPI. I now feel like I have a very good knowledge of how to program from this class (the homework assignments were brutal).
It is now summer and I am interning at a company that is providing me some level of new experiences with programming, but I want more. I want to feel the incredible satisfaction that I got out of my computer classes at RPI whenever I finished a long assignment (generating every possible wordsearch from a set of words to include and exclude comes to mind).
My question is, where do I go from here? I tried following a tutorials online, but they were all too simple. I then tried heading over to sourceforge and helping out with various projects. But, as soon as I downloaded the code I got lost in its complexity. I have never created actual software of a real life applicapable scale. And I don't know where to get started. How do you transition from programming knowledge to actuall creation of software?
I'm also open to learning new languages (javascript/jQuery, ASP .NET, C#, Python), or using new libraries and/or frameworks with c++ (we only used the STL in Comp Sci II) and other languages. Again my question is, where do I go from here? And I am welcome to all possible answers.
Thanks Much,
Michael
You could join a big open source project, you'll learn a lot and accomplish something cool.
EDIT after comment: If this is too complicated for you, try starting a "real" project. I say "real" because it should be something that you want to do, not a "create a blog" or "how to do a loop". For instance last year I created a fully functional project management system that I now use for some of my projects. If this is real, you will be more motivated and you will want to get this done.
Pick the technology you want for it. I'd recommend Ruby on Rails because it's awesome and full of interesting concepts that will improve the way you code overtime (DRY, RESTful, MVC...)... but you can pick whatever you want.
Try to create your project using what you know and basic tutorials. You will get stuck and have to learn some more in order to get the features you want going. To me that's the best way to improve the way you code and general programming knowledge.
Since you'll start the project from scratch, you'll see where to start and how this will evolve. I'll take the project management tool. We started with "A project has todos" and we ended up with all kind of other features such as a complex calendar, a full ajax interface, a embedded chat...
Once you see how you did this, try doing the same with a friend of yours to get a fealing of teamwork in development. Learn how to use SVN, basecamp... learn about software development processes (Agile!), peer programming..
There's a lot to experience! Then you could give open source another try.
Hope that helps
I'd recommend trying a pure functional language, such as Haskell. It's a completely different way of looking at programming, and I found it very satisfying.
I recommend the book Real World Haskell for learning it.
Edit: In response to comments, my interpretation of the question is where can he go from here as a programmer. Functional programming is a logical direction. For someone learning functional programming for the first time, Haskell is nice because it doesn't really allow for imperative programming practices. Furthermore, it has basically all features you will find in other functional languages, which means it will be easy to pick up other functional languages.
I would suggest looking at Project Euler. It's a great and fun way to learn a new language, and it does provide that level of satisfaction when you solve the problems. They offer a huge range of problems at all levels of difficulty.
I think the best way to improve your skills as a programmer is to do what programming was intended for: solve problems. I'm sure you've been playing around on your machine and at one time thought to yourself "I wish there was a program that did this..." or "I wonder if there are any programs that do X..." Instead of just googling to see if someone else wrote it, write it yourself. Start with something small, and gradually make it more complex. Add features. Allow yourself to fail, and when you do, ask yourself (or us at stackoverflow) how to overcome that obstacle. Once you have the basics of programming, everything else is just making big things out of littler things, and the little things are usually pretty easy.
When you are making something you know you will actually use, it's more fun and more gratifying when you finish.
Do you understand all of the following and how they work?
Linked lists (single and double)
Sequential vs. binary search
Binary trees
Stacks
Red-black trees
Algorithmic complexity and big O notation
Recursion
Hash tables and hashing algorithms
If you don't feel completely conversant in any of these, take a class in data structures and algorithms.
It seems like you've experienced many languages, but have not created a real-world application. Creating software in any of those languages will bring you to a new level.
PS: Creating software is much more than just knowing how to mess around with a language.
Check out Design Patterns.
I believe that's beyond mere simple coding.
You could offer your abilities to a non profit or a friend or someone who needs a website or program built.
Tell them you can do it for free and then just go for it. As you start to make it you'll start to see what you need to learn.
For example I bit ago I had the program Peel www.getpeel.com on my Mac. But sold my Mac for Wind as I am traveling.
Seeing that there was nothing for Windows (or nothing I could find) like Peel. I build my own in PHP and am up to a 4th rebuilding of it as I learn betters ways to do each new thing I am learning.
You've got to find a particular type of functionality that interests you. For me it's been basic socket programming and making my own protocols. I got that feeling when I was able to create a functional file uploading control that worked in conjunction with a file upload service on the server which I had created. The protocol handles authentication, chunking and hash comparison. Sometime soon I plan on incorporating file-resume functionality as well.
Well my advice will be to find a problem/project you are interested in and try to code it. Trying a real problem is something that drives you. Find something not to complex but not too simple. Something to try when starting a new language is to write some tools. You can for example program a python script that print metrics on a C++ project. You can write a tool that extract some statistics from a website you use, etc. When I learn programming game programming was quite fun (I was young :-) ). You can try to program some simple game using a 3D engine like Ogre3D for example. Participate in an opensource project is great too but as you stated perhaps a bit overwhelming for now ;-)
Find something you like and that has a REAL useful goal for you. You will thrive to solve the problem and learn a lot along the way !
I think the transition from the kind of finite tractable problems that are part of class projects (and some internships) to "real world" projects is quite tough. Sounds like language syntax, getting bugs out of code etc. is something you are comforatble with.
When we come to larger projects, probably with many release cycles, with developers working together, different kinds of problems emerge. I remember being shocked when I saw my first big project plan - what a small propertion of the time was actually writing code!
The thing I found helpful as a junior was "Sitting By Nelly", I was lucky enough to work for enlighted employers who put me with very experienced and helpful developers. Sometimes to work with, sometime to work alongside. I reckon that helped me get over the hurdles you describe.
So, I reckon you need to find employment of this kind. Be less concerned about specific technologies, salary etc. Look instead for the culture and level of responsibility you would have.
I think you should really start a "real world application" as suggested here. You will see that a real project requires a bit more than just knowing the language.
I suggest you find some simple problem you had issue with, and make a software that solves that issue.
For example, if you want some kind of software that checks RSS feeds every 5 minutes and makes a little pop-up as soon as a new one comes along. Or you want a program that will let you do simple presentations by just dragging a few pictures in.
Then whatever you choose, start by making the simple solution to the problem and extend from there (like do different settings, extra features etc.)
I've looked for the answer to this question for a while now. Most all of the suggestions are usually either help an open source project or build something that interests you. I'm starting to realize that those answers are vague because what's 'interesting' or 'valuable' experience and how to get started doing it is completely subjective. Also, there's only one way to get real experience, which is to work on real projects. It's difficult but find a project, personal, open source, or otherwise that will increase your knowledge in a technology or platform that you think will hold your interest. Then just dig in. It doesn't have to be of earth shattering importance, just valuable in relation to your own goals.
There is no magic bullet transition from academic puzzle solving programs to real world applications. The best way to learn is just to jump in head first. It will take you a very long time to learn what you need to if you only ever look at your own code. You need to be looking at code written by professionals and struggling to understand why it works the way it does until you do understand it.
It seems overwhelming at first, but you will quickly start to see patterns if the application is at all logical. Well written code will be separated in logical ways, so you should be able to pick it apart one layer at a time.
For example, you could try a bottom up approach where you try to understand how the database interactions are handled before looking at the code that uses the database layer. You keep going upward until you get to the GUI event handlers.
Large enterprise applications can be even harder to understand because there might be a lot more than one executable, or component. Try to stay focused and learn what the component is responsible for doing, and then pick it apart a piece at a time.
You will see that there are not just patterns at the function and class level, but at higher levels as well. This makes it simpler to understand what is going on when you understand those patterns.
Try to find an internship or co-op position. I was in a similar situation after my first few courses. I took a co-op position sophomore year and I learned so much more on the job than I did in class. Class is great for teaching you theory and the basics. I learned C# on my first project on my co-op and that got me my second co-op position at another employer (wanted to see how it was working at a small company).
This past spring, I accepted a position at my first co-op employer, reworking my first major project I had started on my co-op. I have a list of side projects I also want to complete, which will help round out my skills, as well as learn some other languages.
So my suggestion is try finding a job where you can have a great mentor. On my second co-op, I learned alot of the coding standards that I code against from my supervisor. He was a great teacher, and really had some great input, and explained why things should be done certain ways.
You will almost certainly go nowhere unless you find something that interests you. Figure out what is interesting, and then how to write software involving it.
The only way to begin is to begin! There is really no other way... The best answers you get would always tell you this. You have the knowledge, now put it to work!
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It seems that the normal progression to join projects is to contribute for a while, earn the trust, then get accepted as a member of the community (i.e. having commit access).
Now, I already apparently know "the best way" of how to get involed, in a manner of speaking; this is not my question; what I was hoping to attain is: How did everyone else get involed? Surely not everyone has gone down the "find a project and submit patches" route - or have they? I dont happen to know anybody in the open source community, so I'm just itching to know...
Perhaps you already knew someone in a community and just fell into it? Maybe you were getting frustrated with some bug and started contributing regulary as a result? Maybe you did just spot a project on SourceForge...
Update:
It seems that the most common reason is simply scratching an itch, to quote singpolyma: "Looking for a project to contribute to is often not the right way." Instead, you should join the open source community by contributing to a project that you already know and use.
Important:
Please, please, please: Tell me about your specific experience, no general answers please. Also, answer only if you are either a project member or a patch contributor. Please do not give advice on how to join a community, this isn't the kind of answer I'm looking for. If you would like to give advice on joing a community, please answer in this other thread.
Great Answers:
Mark Harrison talks about Tcl, cx_Oracle, kap and orapig
singpolyma talks about DiSo and Greasemonkey
Pax talks about contributing to GnuCash because of his wife
Related:
How to get involved in an open source project
How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)
My personal anecdotes:
I got involved with the Tcl community when it was first starting out in 1991 or so. The mailing list and later the usenet newsgroup were pretty important to connect with people. I specialized in user evangelism and teaching, and eventually ended up writing two books about the subject. One of them is still in print after ten years:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0201634740
Now I use a lot of Python, and really like the cx_Oracle package. Again I was active in the mailing list, and contributed a few patches.
I've made a couple of software packages available that I had written for work. By making them open source, I was able to get some nice contributions back, and since they were not the "secret sauce" of my employers at the time, they didn't mind sharing the code. The two most popular packages were
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kap/ The Kinetic Application Processor -- this was built when I was working on the China Internet backbone.
http://code.google.com/p/orapig/ - OraPIG, the Oracle Python Interface Generator -- it generated Python code to call APIs defined in the database, and includes an XML-RPC database interface.
Advice:
Instead of looking for projects to join, try contributing to projects you already use.
It's often difficult to jump into the "core" development, because (a) on a big project, that might be a pretty big chunk of code to understand, and (b) there are probably a core group of people already working on it.
So, suppose you like a certain piece of software and want to start contributing, you can start working around the edges. Here's a couple of concrete tasks that will help you to become integrated with the group.
write some test cases for bugs to add to the regression test suite.
browse through the bug database and find a bug to work on. This might be the best way to get into the core development.
look at the feature request database and see if there's a small task you can work on.
look for "user doc" requests... a lot of them involve writing example code which you can provide.
Good luck!
The way people normally get involved is:
you use the FOSS product in your day to day work
you notice a problem or a missing feature
you mail the maintainer to ask if this bug/missing feature is real
the maintainer says yes, this is a bug/missing feature
you decide to try to fix/add the bug/feature
you code like mad
you submit a patch to the maintainer
the maintainer laughs in or face or says "thanks very much!
If you repeat the last few steps a few times, the maintainer will probably give you commit access to the project's RCS repository, and then you can really become dangerous. But the bottom line is that it is up to you to do something i.e. write some code - merely being "interested" in a project is not enough.
I joined DiSo and Greasemonkey.
The best way I've found to get involved is to get in early in the life of the project, or just be very interested. With DiSo or the various github projects I'm on, it was the former, with my Greasemonkey contributions, the latter.
Looking for a project to contribute to is often not the right way. Use stuff and find out what you want to build/fix, then do that.
I did a little bit of patch work on GnuCash since my wife restarted work part-time recently after our kids were a little more grown up.
I would've rather had my eyes ripped out with a hot poker than re-install Windows but GnuCash was missing something that [a certain other accounting package] had so I told her I'd get it added.
As it turns out, they took my patch and made it a lot better before putting it in (to the point where maybe 1% of the final patch was my stuff) but at least we can now use GnuCash instead of that proprietary stuff. They were also incredibly responsive - from patch submission to patch availability was only a week or so and it was in the product three weeks later.
I also once investigated getting a patch into the process accounting in the Linux kernel but the effort required far outweighed my needs :-)
I don't contribute on a regular basis, more as-needed (find your itch and scratch it). There are some who make a hobby of it but I'd rather be spending my spare time with the kids and, unfortunately, my employer won't pay me to contribute elsewhere.
That last bit particularly galled me since:
the Linux patch would have greatly assisted our product (and a lot of others).
it was change in behavior of another of our products that degraded the usefulness of our product.
the solution was fairly simple, conceptually (the effort required was testing since a problem would have been high-impact [task switching] and very pervasive [everyone using Linux]).
it would have been quicker to code up the patch than the workaround we eventually implemented.
the workaround is a kludge (p'tooee).
now, nobody in the world has the benefit of our patch (including us).
What I did was pretty simple; I opened one.
I have been joined by one permanent developer, and other two who donate code behind the scenes. The project is in very early stages, so not many users have downloaded it.
What really helps an open source project is having a plugin architecture.
It's much easier to contribute a simple plugin for eg. a file format than to try to add something to the Linux kernel. This makes it a lot quicker and easier to build a community.
TODO: Please supply an anecdote.
I'm not really asking about how programmers learn how to program. More about specific technologies. If I wanted to learn Hibernate, how do I know what I should know prior to Hibernate? Should I learn JPA before, during or after Hibernate? Is there a better solution to Hibernate? (And I'm not really looking for information on Hibernate specifically)
Maybe stackoverflow is the place to find these answers, but it seems like with the shear vastness of frameworks, apis, libraries, programming languages, platforms, and whatever other techie word you want to use, it takes an extremely long time to come up to speed on what technology to use, when and what you need to know prior to using it.
Sometimes the best way to learn is to just dig in to a framework. Sure, you could use someones wrapper API around something, but if there is something wrong w/ hibernate, then you wouldn't know what's happening.
And to answer "how do i know what i should know prior to hibernate", you don't, that's why you are learning. When learning about c++, started out with simple data types, but i didn't know about pointers yet, didn't need to, but i learned about them when i got there. Just gotta jump in and start playing around.
I use Wikipedia to compare various technologies to copmlete a task, although it can be incomplete with regards to commercial closed-source frameworks (probably because fewer people have access to them).
For specific technologies such as Hibernate, Java, JPA, LDAP (OpenLDAP in particular), Log4J, anything Apache: they all have wikis and/or forums associated with the product that are usually more helpful than a Google search for learning. Many even come with tutorials and you should try them.
Find a book on the subject and read it. Then email the author with additional questions. Most of these authors are more than happy to help especially if you've bought and read the materials they worked so hard to produce.
If that's still not enough for you, go to a conference covering the subject, if you can make it. Again you can meet many of the people responsible for maintaining and/or creating these technologies and I've found they are always willing to answer questions.
go to sites like Coding Horror, Slashdot, Techcrunch etc and find out what people are talking about. Usually if something is popular it's probably something you might want to talk a look at.
There are these things called "books" that are filled with all kinds of knowledge.
A lot of the time the documentation and/or tutorial for any technology or project will mention what prior knowledge is assumed or useful.
So for example hibernate: http://www.hibernate.org/hib_docs/v3/reference/en/html_single/#tutorial-intro
"This tutorial is intended for new users of Hibernate but requires Java and SQL knowledge"
For me, the things that have helped my career and taught me what questions to ask are:
Podcasts -- .NET Rocks, etc., which introduce and discuss new technologies and put them in context
Join your local users group, and stick around after the presentation to talk shop with the folks there; you can learn a lot just by hearing what other people are doing and what they are working on learning next
Just look around online and start trying to use whatever tool/technology your trying to learn. As you try to learn one thing, you'll realize your lacking knowledge in other needed areas. at which point you can repeat the process of looking around for this new item you need to learn.
for example, maybe you want to learn Rails, so you start following rails tutorials, but you realize you suck at Ruby. so then you start to focus a bit more on the details of Ruby, then come back to Rails with a little more knowledge and continue on till the next roadblock. this isn't really totally correct, but you get the idea.
you won't always find a full guide of how to use everything. just give it a shot and work it out on your own if you have the time
There is an infinite number of things one could learn. Maybe a better approach would be to think of a project that interests you, or join an open source one, and then learn what you need to know to accomplish what is needed in that project. When you're done, pick a new project that might include new things not learned in the last project.
As far as free sources are concerned, as a .NET programmer I like www.asp.net, and there are many others, such as the ASP.NET quickstart tutorials at http://quickstarts.asp.net/QuickStartv20/default.aspx, C-SharpCorner is good, too, if you don't mind C#.
If you don't object to paying a little money, Lynda.com is a decent place. They have OK tutorials on all kinds of things, not just programming, and I got a decent grounding in Javascript using one of their tutorials. They are adding new things all the time, so if they don't have something on Hibernate now, they may later on. I think their basic rate is $25 per month, but you can just pay for one month and then soak up as many courses as you can find time for.
Asking a more specific question will get your a more specific answer here. When I want to read up on something I usually head to Wikipedia and then Google.
The truth is none of us have the time to read everything we'd like to. So I let someone else do it for me!
The way I solve this is by speed-reading the web - aka. subscribing and reading to other peoples blogs.
Everytime I come across something I'm not familiar with I google it.