[Asalyt]

Hello, I'm a person with absolutely no clue about coding who would like to learn how to code or...whatever I need to do to make a MUD. If anybody could point me to a site or something that can help me learn, I'd really appreciate it.

Sincerely,
Asalyt

[Dre]

Coding is easy, it's just writing cryptic sentences in a special order and with lots of strange symbols like {, ;, ] etc.

When you are done writing you push the code through a special program and it makes zero's and ones out of it for the computer.

We'd all be done faster if we just started writing zero's end ones at the start. Much easier to understand.

For the real answer:
Click search: fill in learning to code or starting a mud and I am sure you'll find some useful hints about books etc.
Or if you want to learn to code you could go to google and look for school/university programming and hit enter

Perhaps I sound not very helpful but learning to code only requires one thing: Try and fail and do it over again. Pick up a book and go for it. If you wanna do it the easy way, then download jde and take a few online tutorials. But you could also download a compiler for c or c++ and start there.

Too many options, so if you search you find plenty of ways to start.

[lckychrmsrr]

It seem like every month someone new asks this question. THen a whole bunch of people reply with all their various tips and wisdom. Here's how you learn to code. You have a few options available to you.

1) You take a class. HS or college.

2) You buy a book and learn on your own.

If you are too cheap to buy a book there are lots of free "tutorials" on the web. Trust me when I tell you that you will be much better off with buying a book. Take your book, go page by page through it working every single problem. Rewrite every examply program they provide and do every practice problem at the end of the chapters. By the end of the book you'll have a solid grasp of what ever language it is you wish to learn. To actually get reaally good at coding you have to play around with it. Spend hours upon hours in front of your computer trying out new stuff. You -WILL NOT- learn how to code in a week.

Of all the languages I prefer JAVA. Even though it may take some extra lines of code to get the simplest of things done, the structure is the easiest to understand. It is also widely used throughout the business world and on the web. Although if you're wanting to learn for muds, you should try either C or C++. C++ compiliers all still run C just so you know. So anything you write in C can be run by any program that wants C++ (as a general rule anyway).

Honestly, there are many ways to learn. You have way more options than you think.


I remember I was in your shoes like 6 months ago, and I decided to search the web for good tutorials. In the end, I found that there weren't really many out there. A friend of mine pointed me into the direction of one, which was more like an online book, as opposed to a tutorial and it might be very helpful if I do the same for you.

http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help...._c.html

Now, that's a tutorial, but you still need other tools, and there are other resources that explain that. In fact, I think the first couple of sections of that book explains it. It's a very in-depth book, helps you grasp some concepts. It gets confusing, but you absolutely have to stick with it. Patience is also key, if all you really want to program are MUDs, then you'll be itching to do that, but you probably won't have the right "tools" until you get in the later chapters. However, I stopped around chapter 9 and just jumped to online tutorials explaining some of the more essential things I needed to know and got cracking at a codebase. Honestly, that's where the reading comes in handy. I'm still going back and forth between the book and the codebase, because ####..I'm still kind of terrible.

Have fun and Stick with it.

[Luthien]

I think something worth mentioning is that to get started, you don't necessarily need tutorials and such.

If you have a basic knowledge of C/C++ (or some derivative of C), then you can start to learn. Get yourself a copy of some source code, and start working with it. I'm still a beginning coder really, but I learned by getting myself some background in C/C++ and then starting to tinker with a copy of the code for the MUD I'm an Imm at.

Granted, it would go faster if our Head Coder was around more to ask questions of...but I've made some pretty big strides just myself.

Cheers,
-Luthien
tsos.rarcoa.com

[gth]

You may want to head to the official site for that 'Thinking in C++' link posted above - it's a bit more up to date, and you can download the whole thing to your local hard drive and view it from there...

http://mindview.net/Books....TheBook

[Realedazed]

I have Beginning Programming for Dummies and C++ for Dummies. So far I'm doing good.  

Try your local library,too. No need to buy a book you can get for free. (Unless you are me and rack up on late fees)

[Zaroth]

I agree with everything that has been mentioned to this point...unless you only learn one way efficiently, that being hands on.  Most coders I know of are analytical, and over-analyse things to death which poses a bit of a problem when they take a simple function, and add 10x too many lines, then optimize it in assembly or something of the sort.  

As was mentioned above, I would recommend a download of the e-book, TICPP ver.2 - nice start to C++,  - if you get lost, you can bookmark sections in the .pdf for easy searching and recovery of the information you want without having to page/scroll/click 200 times. I learned to code by opening up the files, one by one and examining how they are pieced together, it gives a basic structure to work with.  Another thing that I didn't see mentioned in this, especially for old and newbie coders alike.. the use of GDB - it's a debugger that'll allow you to monitor changes as the code is running so you can see what's going goofy where, and help pinpoint the issue - most look at the code they added and say "it crashed, but where and why?" where with GDB, you can force commands into it, and it'll give detailed output of anything you tell it to give you - quite the handy tool when you're paging through 500 lines of newly added stuff, and it compiles without a single warning whatsoever but still dumps.  My suggestion is to start with a compiler on your computer, and tinker with the basics there while going through the TICPP book - the book is free to d/l, and if you're running windows I would recommend Bloodshed Dev-C++, falls under GPL(free == good), has all the goodies, and always new packages to add for further functionality - it handles C and C++ quite nicely.  It also runs on any Windows OS, 95-XP, so if you are diehard Windows 95 due to stability reasons, it'll still work without any issues.  I really cannot thing of anything else to throw into it at this time, and I hope this bit of information helps some.

  Zaroth-

[Hardestadt]

One thing you may notice from the posts above. Coding and learning to code takes a very large amount of time. You will fail, but you need to get up and keep going with it to achieve a good understanding.

Good luck.

Leigh
CTO
Persistent Realms LLC

[Geras]

A rule of thumb I use here in university is the easier a language is to program in, the less efficient it is, so it's kind of a trade off between time to learn a language and time to make money to pay for the extra resources.

[Asalyt]

K, I'm going to download the book, then read it...then download the codebase the person mentioned...then I'm finally going to go the library and pick up C++ for dummies and such, and then I'm going to try coding and fail. Then try and fail. Does that about sum it up? Any more suggestions, I'm still listening. And thanks to everybody who answered. Now...time to go to the library...wee, late fees!

If I haven't emphasized it, I'm going to now.

Patience is absolutely essential.

[frumbert]

The way I got into coding is sneered at by most people - I started in BASIC (around 1985 through 1990) by reading other peoples programs and trying out stuff. I never had a manual and was the only person I knew who was "into it", but reading lots and lots of code (tens of thousands of lines) and checking out a whole score of different types of programs like games, databases, word processors and graphics programs, I got a feel for how to structure an application: where to take a function, how to optimise, how to store and retrieve structured data, etc. From here i was able to advance into assembler and C and the languages of power.
I was always interested in games, and MUDs because I love reading and the interaction was a bonus. I just practiced writing components of IF games in BASIC because it's really simple to program in - and that's actually important. You don't want to have to learn a whole language as powerful as C or Pascall to find out that what you're trying to achieve just won't work the way you want it to. Playing around with a simple language (these days vbscript & javascript) to try out an idea is a great way to start on a project. I regularly code up a basic structure or program in vbscript (still programming in basic !! to see it it would work - e.g. a text parser is a huge part of a modern MUD, but you can try out the basic functional interaction - splitting, identifying & requalifying phrases, hashing, etc all without much fuss in a quick language, work out what you need to do, and then use C or Perl or whatever to actually do your real work in.
I'd agree with the other threads here: get yourself a decent book to learn the language that you need and go through everything over and over until it makes sense, but don't limit yourself to that thinking/language/advice Different languages and/or development tools have their strengths and weaknesses. Expose yorself to them, even if only to try out Hello World apps.