Programming - Learning at a slow pace
I am currently enrolled in an Intro to Visual Basic class and I am loving it.
I spend quite a bit of time reading and taking notes about methods and properties and such. I spend a lot of time writing psuedo code to get things laid out on paper and make sense of them. I spend a lot of time problem solving and trying to figure out what order I will put things in. I spend a lot of time going over “programming challenges” from the book that are not even assigned to me just so I feel like I have learned as much as I can. In a nutshell, learning programming takes a damn good amount of time.
When I was younger and first interested in computers and technology, I always was searching for the guide to learn how to do something as quickly as possible. What I am learning today is that programming is a gradual process. What I am learning now is that there are three steps to living “the programming way of life”:
1. Learn how to solve problems
This is something that has taken me years to understand. When I was young up until about last semester I thought that learning programming was all about the language and learning all the different methods and how that language was laid out. I am sorely mistaken. I have learned that it is all about solving a problem efficiently. Not every language is going to be appropriate for every programming problem. That is why it is important that I know how to approach the problem and decide what action to take next.
2. Learn one language at a time
This is probably the hardest thing that I have had to overcome. Once I starting learning some of the first languages that I learned, I wanted to jump to a different language and start “banging” that one out. What I have found from formally learning VB and then looking at other languages such as C or even Python is that they are inherently the same. Of course these languages can do different things in different ways and sometimes look completely different, but programming and problem solving is the most important and hardest part; learning an additional language when you have one “down” doesn’t seem as hard as that first language. I am excited to move on and learn more and more languages.
3. Slow down
This is something that I have to remind myself everyday. I need to slow down and take the language that I am learning in and let it “marinate”. I’d rather learn how to program in 10 years than learn how to do it in 24 hours. I want to know the intracacies and know deep down how the language works. I want to be able to think in code and be able to use it as a second language. This cannot be done in 24 hours. This requires a ton of patience, caffeine, hard work, and insight. Slowing down is what is going to keep me above the cut.
I believe that if I apply these three guidelines to my programming methods that I will of course succeed and go as far as I want to as a programmer. I am not entirely trying to be a “programmer” per se, but I know that my future in computers and technology will be filled with programming and problem solving. To be able to learn both and do them well will be indispensible in the future.
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So, I was pretty excited about the release of the BlackBerry Storm last week. A touchscreen BlackBerry seems like something to get excited about. I saw the commercials, read what other bloggers and tech pundits were saying, and actually became somewhat giddy about this gadget. Well, I came to find out this weekend what the Storm was all about.
I was just reading an article over at CNN called “
The anwer to this question is… obviously everyone. 
almost eveything else is the same. This will not even touch the iPhone.
So, according to the email yesterday that I received from Verizon, the new 
I understand that this news is somewhat old. Old in tech terms meaning about 5 days (actually that’s acient). 
