Computer Programming: Visual Basic?

Your question has caught my eye because it sounds just like how I started out. I was 14, learned how to stop a program running in "basic" from executing and look at the code. Seeing that it was just odd English, I started writing little programs like what you described. My mother belonged to a soccer assocation and she kept names and teams on the computer, but was using a word processor to do it. I came up with the idea to write a small database program that would take input, save it to the floppy disk, and then print a roster. I continued then with deleting and inserting and so on. Well, the Commodore 64 didn't have much memory at all and my program was becoming too big and slowing down the computer. My dad then got me a book on Assembly Language, which I read and learned. Assembly was faster and used less memory as it doesn't need to be compiled like basic. I slowly converted by basic database program over to assembly and she used it until she left the soccer association.

I really don't know what to tell you to do... that was the avenue I went; I wanted to learn how to save and retrieve data from a floppy, as well as print which led me into bigger and better things.

I stayed with computers. It's my favorite hobby of them all. I've never had any training, ever; everything has been self taught by getting things off the Internet and trial and error. But I never gave up. I recently wrote a website and have launched it. I'm not doing any marketing right now because there are some things I want to do to it yet. But I started off like you at 14 with the language "basic" and using the resources off the Internet and lots of trial and error, I can now do things like this: http://microscriber.com/ .

Good luck to you. You are definately heading down the right path.

Some programming languages are compiled into machine language, and then the computer executes the machine language directly at run time. Other languages are interpreted at run time by another program. C++ is a compiled language. Compiled languages produce far more efficient and performant programs. Interpreted languages are more flexible. Typically programs that will be executed a lot and must have good performance are written in compiled languages, whereas programs that must be finished quickly and where performance doesn't matter are written in interpreted languages (such as Visual Basic). Good software companies use compiled languages, because the greater difficulty of coding with them is offset by the better performance for end users. Greedy companies use interpreted languages because it allows them to get the software out the door more quickly, even though it uses more resources and costs more for end users to use. BASIC (essentially all versions) and Java are not compiled languages. When they are "compiled," that simply means they are translated to a more compact form, but they must still be interpreted at run time, which slows them down.

Learning Visual basic will give you no help in learning visual c++ thatrs like saying im gonna learn italian first then french must be easier my advice is to learn the one you want to master now and leave the other one out.

My advice is VB is easier but more app based and VC++ is better if its games based so learn the one that suits what you want to write for. although i have written basic friut machine programs and monopoly and card games in vb quite succedsfully i just wish i had learned VC++ back then instead cause now it looks like greek to me

"Master" that is a tall order. There is always more to learn. Get to the point that you understand what is happening. Learn API calls. C++ will get to be easy to understand when you understand how it works. After a while of programming in vb, you will notice how you can read some C++.

Take a break from VB and learn programming. http://www-old.oberon.ethz.ch/WirthPubl/AD.pdf is free and it's the best programming course there is. (Wirth is the genius who invented Pascal, Ada, Modula 2 and a host of other things.) Once you understand programming, you'll start to see problems as code.