What programming basics should I learn?

Question

I've had a very odd learning experience in programming. I was sort of taught C++, but I didn't get a lot out of it. Here's what I did get out of it: headers and variable declaration. And I tried to teach myself PHP, in which I learned a lot of. The problem is, a lot of my knowledge is widespread, random, and designed for specific situations.

So, my questions is: What basics are there to programming in most languages?

Answer 1

Pointers. Because so few people actually understand them.

Recursion and iteration, plus what the difference is, and when you use them.

Get an algorithms book and work through the exercises -- you won't be disappointed.

Answer 2

I think this thread may be of interest to you.

Answer 3

If I were you, I'd go back and learn the C programming language from the class K&R book.

Answer 4

Another important thing not mentioned here yet is just Object Oriented Programming. The ideas revolving around classes, inheritence, interfaces, etc.

Answer 5

A very important basic programming skill is the ability to think at many different levels of abstraction and to know when and which level of abstraction is the most appropriate for a particular programming task.

Answer 6

The term "basics" implies a short list, but to be an effective programmer you have to learn a LOT of concepts. Once you do learn them, though, you'll be able to apply many of the same concepts across languages.

I've compiled a (long!) list of concepts that are important in several, if not most, programming languages.

• Language syntax

  • Keywords
  • Naming conventions
  • Operators
    • Assignment
    • Arithmetic
    • String
    • Other
  • Literals
  • Conditionals
    • If/else
    • Switch/case
    • What is considered true or false (0? Empty String? Null?)
  • Looping constructs
    • for
    • foreach/iteration
    • while
    • do-while
  • Exception handling
  • importing/including code from other files

• Type system

  • Strong/weak
  • Static/dynamic

• Memory management

• Scoping

  • What scopes are available
  • How overlapping scopes are handled

• Language constructs/program organization

  • Variables
  • Methods
  • Functions
  • Classes
  • Closures
  • Packages/Modules/Namespaces

• Data types and data structures

  • Primitives
  • Objects
  • Arrays/Lists
  • Maps/Hash/Associative Array
  • Sets
  • Enum
  • Strings
    • String concatenation
    • String comparison and equality
    • Substring
    • Replacement
    • Mutability
    • Syntax for creating literal strings

• Functions, Methods, Closures

  • Method/function overloading
  • Method/function overriding
  • Parameter passing (pass-by-value/pass-by-reference
  • Returning values (single return/multiple return)

• Language type (not mutually exclusive)

  • Scripting
  • Procedural
  • Functional
  • Object-oriented

• Object-oriented principles

  • Inheritance
  • Classical vs Prototypical
  • Single, Multiple, or something else
  • Classes
  • Static variables/global variables
  • access modifiers (private, public, protected)

• API (or how to do basic stuff)

  • Basic I/O
  • Print to Standard Out
  • Read from Standard in
  • File I/O
    • Read a file
    • Write a file
    • Check file attributes
  • Use of regular expressions
  • Referencing environment variables
  • Executing system commands
  • Threading model
    • Create threads
    • Thread-safety
    • Synchronization primitives
  • Templating

Answer 7

Find out what sort of thing you want to program for first - e.g. web, PC applications, Java based applications, mobile devices, reports, system interfaces, business to business interfaces, etc. then go from there.

Answer 8

Testing! (unit testing, integration testing, fixtures, mock objects, ...)

And not a programming skill, but surely a development skill: using revision control, and learning to commit sets of changes that handle one (or a few related) requirement, or bugfix, and will always result in a source tree that compiles without errors. This will teach you to organize your work :-)

And last but not least: English... :-) Again, this is not a programming skill, and I know some may disagree, but I feel that any programming language that uses English keywords, should also be programmed in English. So: use English variable names, and so on. I'd even say that the code comments should be in English, but I am sure even more people would disagree about that... So: learn how others describe their code, and adhere to that.