[hackerspaces] (no subject)

[john arclight]

Zak,

You raise a good point. People have access to more high tech stuff
than they ever have before, and yet they know less about it than ever.
Many of us who are older (I'm 33) started off using an 8-bit home
computer or an early PC that only worked via command-line. You were
forced to understand a bit of how the machine and its software worked
because you had to use commands and write simple programs to make it
work. Also, those machines were simple enough that a person could wrap
their head around them pretty easily.

A new Windows PC has so many layers of BIOS, drivers, kernel, DLLs,
and other stuff that it seems unreasonable that anyone is going to
pick up and learn it all.

Fortunately, there are tools that simplify this world and let you just
get on with what you wanted to do.  Ruby is a great start. Some
colleges also have on-line classes in JAVA or other programming
languages.

For me, it's easiest to learn something if I have a goal. Think about
a tool that would be useful, like a calendar that keeps track of your
school's holidays, or a web-based calculator or something. And then
build it. Give yourself reasonable milestones, like "Print the
statement 'Hello World' " on the screen, and "Have it read in a list
of holidays in this format" And then build off your little successes
until you have something useful. This will take anywhere from a week
to many months, depending on how ambitious your project is. But you
will learn a lot. The web is a great resource for figuring out your
problems along the way.

Arclight

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 7:52 PM, zak Tray <zt980 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> i am a student who is taking a computer repair class, it is great but it
> leaves off with just the hardware of the computer. I signed up for a
> programing class and the class never made it to class registration (because
> of lack of students) so i desided to start learning online and was wondering
> if any one would give some time to atleast teach me the basics of
> programing, and maby how hacking works.  i just know that i would love
> getting in to that part of computers and it would help me out in the future.
>
> so if anyone can help please email me.
> thank you
>
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