learning programing

[Jimmy Cao]

Programing is a hard thing to teach. I myself was never "taught" programing by any person or group of people. I took the initiative and read books.

First of all, I do not like the way Easy-C works, maybe it's just because i'm too used to normally programing. I tried to use Easy-C to program a Vex robot my team made, and it was very confusing. I could not figure out how to replace a if statement with an else if statement. Eventually i just programed it in MPLAB. So, point of the matter is i would not use Easy-C unless you have no other alternative.

I believe it will be extremely difficult to program if you do not want to learn. If the willingness to learn is there, then either find a quick online tutorial or a nice little book and go through it.

For simple programing, logic is the hardest part to understand. Learn to organize your code, and use comments to keep yourself/others nonconfused (is that a word). The syntax isn't too hard to learn for C, it's just a lot of memorization.

After getting past the basics, having a nice creative mind do your programing is nice. It's nice to be able to look at a robot (or a concept even) and think... "If I want this robot to do such-and-such, then I should program such-and-such functions".

Lastly, a quick tip. ALWAYS keep your complicated code organized. Especially when making long functions (Like our PID for the camera aiming system last year) it can become very easy to forget what each line does, making it impossible/almost impossible to debug.