Learning Practical Programming (General discussion topic)

Question

Right now I'm in the process of learning a few different programming languages (C, C++, and Python to be specific), and while it's brain racking, it's a lot of fun (somebody's sick, sick, idea of fun). Pretty much all of the practice programs I write though involve various forms of number crunching or string processing and... not a whole lot else, truthfully. While these things are useful for learning programming concepts, I've sort of begun to realize that these things aren't going to help me create any sort of practical PC applications.
So my question then becomes, what's a good place to go to start learning how to make my programs talk to the OS, so they can do something useful for a change? Also, what are other good concepts to learn in order to apply what I'm learning in more practical, useful, ways?
Last edited by OakRaider4Life (2012-10-02 02:05:18)

Answer 1

OakRaider4Life wrote:
drcouzelis wrote:
First of all, thank you for recognizing that C and C++ are different languages. They are very different languages, and, in my opinion, too many programmers lump them together.
Next, it's time for you to learn what you'll be spending most of your time using: libraries! If you want to make a GUI application you could use GTK (C), Qt (C++), or wxWidgets (Python). If you want to make a video game you could use Allegro (C), SFML (C++), or Pygame (Python).
Of course, this is just a quick list of some example libraries. You might find a library that you'd like to learn that better suites your needs. But programming languages by themselves are boring. The exciting power is in the libraries.
Very awesome! I will definitely start checking out some of the various libraries out there!
I'd recommend SFML in combination with C++ (It also has a TON of bindings for various languages though) if you want to develop games. It comes not only with graphics capabilities, but also with audio, network, input etc. And fully crossplattform too!
If you go with SFML I recommend sfml-git from the AUR, since it comes with huge bugfixes(especially if you want to support intel gpus).
wxWidgets is also rather nice with C++, GUI-programming can be quite messy but wxw is the way to go if you ask me (with 1 exception: .NET in C# under windows, because of its awesome visual designer).
Other libraries I hugely recommend is mysql++ for databaseaccess, tinyxml for XML-parsing/creation, boost for loads of things, but primarily for crossplatform filehandling and stringmanipulation. Also go with C++11
Last edited by Haikarainen (2012-10-02 14:31:06)