Get books on programming, read, practise, read more, practise more, read even more, practise until you pass out, and so forth.

I'm serious about practising so much. I didn't practise in the first semester and now at the end of the second semester I still barely know how to program. We need to make an Angry Birds clone thing before next week Monday, but I really haven't a clue what to do and even if I skip every lesson and learn/work 24/7 the following week, there's no way I can ever finish it, so I've just given up on it. All the fault of my fucking laziness. Even now I'm slacking off.

Anyway, you'll probably learn Java at uni so get some books on that.

BUT BUT BUT: you don't actually need to know anything about programming before uni (at least not in Belgium), so as long as you pay attention in class, read and work a lot you shouldn't have any problems.

What platform are you most interested in?

Some platforms use platform-specific libraries to access hardware, books aren't always going to help.

I'm hosting a DS-related programming guide, it's on GBATemp if you're interested. I'll eventually start hosting it here aswell, but for now it's just a lot of unnecessary copy-pasting when the guide is unfinished.

Nathan's right. Practice practice practice practice. Aside from that, it helps if you learn the MVC principle (it's highly useful in web development, but just as much in any other kind of development) and get familiar with some design patterns. I'll urge you to get familiar with them, but don't program in design patterns. They're good to learn how to structure your code, but they're not lego blocks to build your code with. Also read up on some basic best practices. I used to put all my forms in one huge file, and all my functions in another. That's a horrible mess to maintain afterwards. If you read up on best practices before you start, you'll avoid such nightmares.


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Oh, and most importantly: take a break every 3 hours, max! If you don't, you'll just make a mess, waste tons of time doing stuff like: "But why do I get no results from my database? The query's right there!" while you got the query, but never executed it. I've seen plenty of people (myself included) make that mistake when starting out, and wasting up to 5 hours looking for it, while all that was needed, was taking regular breaks, which'll avoid such problems.

This post has been edited by auto system, Sun, April 29th, 2012 at 22:16

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Thanks for the advice lads   between my break from the end of college and the start of uni ill pick up some books and practise