[WEB4LIB] How to learn programming

[John Creech]

On Wed, 5 Jul 2000, Cory Stier wrote:

> 1.) What is the best way to learn "how to program"? 

Hi, Cory.  I'm a hacker, not a programmer, so the following plus four bits
gets you a cup of coffee.

Find anybody around you who programs--folks at your campus computing
center, other librarians, IT staff, compsci faculty, whomever--and buy
them coffee, lunch, chocolate; whatever it takes. Just so long as they'll
answer one question at a time and send you back to thrash at a script
again, they'll be doing you a service. 

Find students who're decent at programming, like computer science majors,
and hire them as student assistants.  Shamelessly pump them for
information and help. Check out local/regional Perl (or PHP or other
languages) etc. users groups.

Get a relatively cheap and modest sized machine installed behind your
campus (and possibly library) firewall, keep it in your office where it's
*relatively* safe, install Linux or some flavor of free BSD unix or
whatever you have/want/can get on it...and use it as a test server. 

John Creech
Electronic Resources & Systems Librarian
Central Washington University Library 
400 E. 8th Ave. | Ellensburg, WA 98926 | 
office - 509-963-1081 || fax - 509-963-3684
creechj at www.lib.cwu.edu