  About Beginner Programming Tricks And StuntsI began programming computers when I was in Junior High and High school, back in the late seventies, early eighties. At the time, I was doing BASIC language programming on TRS-80's and also on a Texas Instruments 99/4A. And on the beast of a computer which was simply known as "THE WANG". Wow. Those were the days.When I was in High School I started learning some other programming languages; including Assembly language for both the TRS-80 and the TI 99/4A. In college I took a course in Pascal, which turned out to be my only formal training in computer programming. And after the last day of that semester, I haven't once done a stitch of programming in Pascal. Once I finished my college career, I started learning C and C++, which I used extensively, but only as a hobby...I sort of "stumbled into" my programming career; in the mid-nineties I got a call from an engineering firm that needed help with a project, and wondered if I wanted to do some sub-contracting. A few months later a company which was creating an MMI (Man Machine Interface) package asked me if I wanted to do some work building device drivers for PLCs. (And if you don't know what that means, don't sweat it!) Along the way I kept picking up cute little programming tricks - either by playing around myself, or by watching what other people were doing. Ways to streamline my code; either making it more readable, or faster executing. Sometimes I would see pieces of code other people had done, and I would grab it. Copy. Paste. Voila! Often I wouldn't really pay attention to what I was doing, or why the code I grabbed actually worked. But that isn't really a healthy practice; putting code in your software without really understanding what you're doing can be a dangerous practice. In light of that, I decided to put together these pages for beginning programmers, to explore and explain some of the very simple ways you can streamline your code. All the code snippets are in BASIC, since that's fairly universal, and most beginning programmers have at least dabbled with it. Of course, if you understand the code snippets, you can rewrite them in whatever language you choose! On each page there is a section at the end called "Other Scenarios". This section will ask a few questions for you to answer. These questions will help you "generalize" what you've learned, and may be a good homework assignment for programming students.
Contents copyright 2005 by Douglas Twitchell. Contents of this page may not be reproduced without permission of the author. For information on using this site in a classroom situation, please visit the Teachers page. More programming information and other tips can be found at Virtu Software's Ask Doug site.
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