Sridhar Ratnakumar wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 7:18 AM, shridhar kyrlageri
> <shridhar_...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>>  i m an engineering student.. i want to be a very good programmer... but i
>> dont know where to start and what to do... can u please help me..
> 
> The best way for me to get started was by *writing* programs. I
> started with computers by learning C - I remember completing every
> exercise problems in the C book I picked up for learning no matter how
> long it took for me. For example, I spent about 2 hours in writing a
> program to print the multiplication table from 1x1 to 10x10. It was
> the fascination at seeing a program do what one intended it to do that
> drove me to complete any program.
> 
> Practice coupled with the fascination makes you a good programmer.

Good advice but I would add "reading" a lot of programs as well.  You'll never
by yourself come up with all the various approaches to a problem so go read
how other people do it and add those to your set of techniques.  And with the
rise of Open Source there are plenty of programs to study the internals of.
Heck, just reading the source of the Twisted framework will teach you some
really cool things about Python programming (those guys were *smart*!).

I suggest learning to read C source even if you don't program in it, because
the underlying infrastructure of the software world uses it so much.  I've
studied the C code of the Python interpreter and certain modules to gain an
appreciation of how it works and its limits.  Sometimes you need to read the C
source of a library before wrapping it in Python or maybe the docs are for the
C API.

In a career of programming, you'll read far more source then you'll ever
write. ;-)

-Jeff

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