PureBasic Forums - English

Hi,I was just thinking that it may be a good thing for beginners,if there was some sort of suggestion list of programs,in terms of size and difficulty that were recommended for beginners to try to program,each using or introducing new ideas,and new areas/functions of PureBasic.
And prehaps have a few pointers regarding each program.

I myself have only written a few programs,and find it difficult to find somthing to code that will help learn more about PB ,whilst not scaring me away from trying.

Does anyone think this would be a good idea,prehaps a sticky?.

It's a good idea, although it could cause a few problems. It might accidently encourage noobies to just make a few changes to the example and take all of the credit for it.

Do not supply an example. Simply publish the exercise program description.

Yes,thats what I was thinking.

A goal for the program,with ideas and suggestions of techniques and coding styles to achive the goal.

As I`m sure there will always be many ways of reaching the goal,all of them different.(As I know,I recently asked about speeding up the loading of text into an editor gadget,and was shown a way I would never have thought of,which worked really well,And I have now learned that,thanks to someone else`s knowhow being passed to me.)

They could be along the lines of the following.



Program: Lotto number generator.

Goal produce 6 numbers between 1-49,And output as a string.

Ensure each number is the same output size(Padded)

Ensure there are no duplicate numbers

Output should be in acending numerical order.


Some of the above steps will have many ways of being implimented,depending on your style.

All of these styles will help beginners to understand that there are meny ways to the same goal.


The above probably seems really simple to someone whos been coding for a while,but to a beginner,it may be much harder.

For most steps it is simple,but for one or two there may be a few questions,and it`s these steps that will teach the most.


I just think that there is so much to PB that a lot of users never try,but would be great to use,and learn.

I mean How many users can say they have used most of the commands in PB,and that they understand there use.

Thanks.

I don't know ferty, personally I don't think this would have worked for myself as I tend to work on things which interest me. Think about it, a newbie is, by definition, not a professional programmer (as yet!) and so is starting out on this road, motivated probably by self interest and a fascination for the art of programming. For me, being told what to program would remove a lot of the enjoyment, the satisfaction of having produced a program all of my own.

I think some kind of tutorial system might be more appropriate, although blueznl, for example, has done a grand job with his PB survival guide and others have posted various tutorials from time to time.

People could offer to create some basic tutorials or someone might take charge and request others to do so. E.g. I nominate Fangbeast to create a tutorial on using SQLite and Sparkie to create a tutorial on pulling impossible solutions to impossible problems from out of nowhere!.

Myself, I'm working on a tutorial on how to make a fortune from writing Purebasic programs. (It begins by encouraging the programmer to write, and sell, a tutorial on how to make a fortune... Uhm, that's about as far as I've got actually! )

Cheeky bugger!! I'll do an SQLITE tutorial the day someone shows me how to integrate blobs into my existing code. Until then, it's not worth it because it would be incomplete.

I'll second the vote for a blob tutorial (although the example is nice). Bind too

Fleshing out the sqlite documentation in PBOSL would also be a nice addition, if you have time on your hands

cheers

I can't touch the pbosl stuff as Kiffi's stuff is all wrapper based and I code in a totally different way. As well, Kiffi really knows his stuff and I don't (grin). It would very likely confuse everybody.

To be honest, the core of Sqlite is the same as Ms-Access and MySql (and dozens of other varieties) and that's plain old sql language itself. The way Kiffi and I do things is just fluff (I hope he doesn't mind that description) and at the end of it all, you will probably do things in a totally different way once you understand basic sql usage.

All my applications have been rewritten at least 4 times as I was learning and it didn't take me very long to realise that the sql query I was using in Access was exactly the same as the one I was using in Sqlite and the rest of the code was just handling the DLL's I was using to do the job to the various environments.

So I reccomend that anyone who wants to use sqlite just grab a copy of the free sqlite browser tool, a basic sql manual that illustrates the simple uses of SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE (the 4 main keywords you will want to learn) and practice with that tool, create a simple database in it and see the effects of the various commands.