000 - Introduction - What you need to know to program

 

 

Programming can seem intimidating to someone who has never tried it. One of the reasons is that people tend to think that they need to “know everything about computers” to get started. As if you needed to be a real IT expert to venture into creating a little program, but that's not true.

 I myself am not a “super tech” guy. When I have to do something different, like when I had to set up my computer as a mini server to run some tests on my page, I go there, do some research, do some digging and in general I manage to do what I had to do, but I don't know about those things beforehand. (there are things, of course, that I don't even try to do, because they require specialization).

 To begin with, computing is a huge universe, and I don't think anyone “knows everything” about computers. And you always have to start somewhere. If you want to start programming, it makes sense to start by learning a language and creating basic little programs. Everything else can come later.

  It's a little scary when we see an ad for a programming course on YouTube and the guy starts talking about a bunch of terms that we don't know what they mean. But they are very specific terms, library names, APIs (you'll learn what these things mean without any problems if you're interested) used for specific aspects, specific functions. Every professional programmer chooses an area of ​​expertise, then he has to learn the technologies specific to that area.

 But before, way before you can become a professional programmer, you have to learn the basics, the basic logic of a computer program. And more: not always the goal is to become a professional programmer. Learning programming logic is enriching for anyone who is interested, and you can use it to make your own creations, your little programs and games, and later think about becoming – or not – a developer in the market.

 

 

I wanted to create some 2D games, I had game ideas and I wanted to learn how to program them. And that's what I did. I managed to create a game for Android and, for now, 3 more to run in Browser, on my own website. They work well and are just the way I wanted them. I feel safe and able to bring my ideas to life, even if when I see one of these course announcements I still don't know what all the specific terms mean. If you look closely, all my games could have been created in the 90s. The only differences are the screen resolution and the emergence of smartphones, but that has nothing to do with how the games themselves work. It satisfies my needs at the moment, I'm into 90's games and a somewhat minimalist view of design has fueled, not hindered, my creativity.

 

Anyway, I had created a blog about programming and my games, but I wasn't so satisfied. I tried to talk about specific things about the games, but the topics of the posts were a bit random, the code for my first game wasn't always easy to understand and the explanations required the reader to already know a lot of things.

 Since I want to be able to recommend this blog to people, including my son, if he is interested, I will start over and build knowledge little by little, trying not to expect the person to know anything that is not explained in a previous post.

 Let's see how far I can get this way. Maybe we can create a complete game here, from scratch. See ya.