Well, the question is very broad. What aspects of programming do you want to learn?
I should point out that I spent some time over the last couple weeks learning VBA, and the
online documentation ranks as some of the most poorly-written, disorganized mess of
pseudo-documentation I've had to put up with in many years. It has aspirations to become
merely poor documentation, but has a long way to go to achieve that, so I would not
recommend it as a methodology for learning how to program.
First, I'd suggest choosing a language. For .NET, your best choices are either Visual
Basic or C#. VB may be superficially easier to learn, but C# is vastly more powerful, but
takes a serious learning effort.
You should probably start with fairly modest programming projects that have nothing to do
with VBA or automation, only because the concepts of document-specific VBA (PowerPoint,
Word, Excel, etc.) add a lot of learning curve to the fundamental problem of learning
programming.
Get a book on introductory programming in VB or C# (I'm sure there are people who can
recommend one; I don't need a book for either one, so I don't know the literature) and
write some little programs. WinForms toy programs might be a good start. After a few
weeks or months of learning the nature of the programming language and the programming
problem, you're ready to tackle PPT, Word, Excel, etc. because you won't be fighting two
problems, learning programming and learning the document structures, at the same time.
Solve one problem at a time.
Key here is that while you might be more motivated by writing VB/VBA/C# code in your
application of choice, the documentation is so abysmal that you will quickly become
confused, not seeing the forest for the trees, as it were.
I like to start beginners with simple problems until they master the art of writing
algorithms, then proceed to more complex things.
By the way, expect to spend a year or two becoming really, really comfortable with
programming. There's a lot of stuff to learn just to get the basics down solid, and then
toss in the complexity of document structures and you're going to be in real pain if you
try to do all this the first week.
joe
Hi,
Can anyone help me out in learning programming i am a template designer but
now i would like to learn programming so can any one help me out learning the
basics i would like to learn .NET
Thanks and regards
Rathish
Joseph M. Newcomer [MVP]
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