Joey wrote:
hold on. im getting confused. i have only programmed with AGI. i only did the print commands and stuff with qbasic. does anyone suggest i learn visual basic 6 instead? it may be easier for my first REAL language. if so, could you suggest a good book that comes with VB6? thank you.
As I said before, I would recommend
Scheme as a good first language, especially if you study from the online book
How to Design Programs and use the
Dr Scheme interpreter. It is admittedly a very different language from C and C++, but I see that as an advantage, personally. And the price is right...
Alternatively, you can pick up a copy of
Assembly Language Step by Step and dive into the deep end. It sounds weird to say that, but it is this book is simply so good that it really would work, IMO.
Beyond these two - which I recommend primarily because of the excellent texts in question - the best language to try and learn from today is probably Python. It is an interpreted language, which has some important advantages when learning from scratch (no compiling, faster code turnaround, the ability to run small pieces of code rather than having to write whole programs) , and it is very easy to learn, yet it is close enough to the C family of languages that going from Python to C++ is a relatively easy step. There are several excellent tutorials on Python around the web, and O'Reilly and Assoc has a book entitled
Learning Python that is well regarded and relatively cheap ($34.95 USD).
While a lot of people learn C++ from the start, it really is quite overwhelming. I would recommend having at least
two other programming languages before tackling C++ (though C can be one of these).
Since I personally dislike VB for quite a number of reasons (sadly, I don't have time right now to go into them), I would not recommend learning it at all; others will surely disagree with me, but that's what makes for horse races. For practical reasons, you'll probably have to pick it up some day, but I think that learning it as your first language would be a grave error.
Quote:
also: am i able to distribute or sell any programs i make with vb6?
That depends on the edition of VB you have, I think. I know that the Educational Edition has restrictions on on that; I think you need to have the professional or enterprise editions to compile production code. I'd check Microsoft's web site, and read through the EULA that came with your copy
very carefully.