Hi everyone,
I'm new here and hope to find some good info to help me more with programming.
I'm from Australia and am 14 years old

Hello there and welcome to the forum.
You might be one of our youngest members after George

Welcome LittleEngineer!

dBforums - Database Support Community is mostly about databases, although programming does enter into many of our discussions.

If you really want to get into coding and development, you might also want to check into http://www.hotscripts.com/forums/ (which used to be called http://www.programmingtalk.com until a few months ago) where programming is their primary focus and databases are secondary.

Glad to have you aboard the forum! Maybe you can demonstrate for some of the grown-ups around here how people should act!

-PatP

He's likely more mature that the rest of us.
By the way, I lived in Australia for two years when I was about your age (Melbourne). I didn't do any programming way back then, though!

I started around your age. PC's weren't available then so my 1st computer was an acorn system 1 which had to be programmed in machine code (no soppy assembly language on this machine). The graphics and keyboard were a bit limited! Sure learned a lot though.

What languages are you trying to learn and/or what type of programs do you want to write?

My first computer was actual acorns, which I lined up like abacus beads.

Thanks for the website PatP i already registered.

The languages that i am doing fairly well at is php, MySQL, javascript, ajax and ASP but sometimes i get the syntax wrong and it comes up with an error.

One language that i really would really like to learn is Visual Basic but my dad can't afford visual basic editor 08.

The programs that i am trying to write is a search engine (my newest one), an image gallery and a forum.

When i am finished my search engine the first website i will get it to index would be this one.

I also started to learn machine code (binary) but couldn't think of a use for it.

Assuming you are running Windows 2000 or later (XP, Vista, 7) with a decent amount of RAM (at least 3 GB), you might be interested in the Visual Basic "Try" edition. It has significant limitations, but the cost is right!

Just as an observation, search engines take ENORMOUS amounts of storage, and huge amounts of processing power. Do a bit of research on the existing search engines... The sizes of their storage and processing engines are frightening!

-PatP

have a look on fleabay for academic editions
I have a sneaking suspicion that you would qualify for such
you may even be able to get a legit original from Microsoft. if your fathers company is big enough I seem to remember Microsoft licensing additional copies form big companies (may be limited to the US though)

if you have a choice I'd suggest you consider other languages sich as C# or possibly Java.

Java has the advantage that its cheap (well free) is multi platform. you may well be adaptable enough to pick up Java immedaitely, for me in my addled dotage struggle getting to grips with all the libraries & classes, mind you I could never get to grips with all the classes on C++ OWL & MFC

Ok thanks for the info PatP i will do a little bit of research and thanks for the link for visual basic "try" edition.

I might try learning java and C# as well as visual basic eventually.
I will try to look on fleabay if i can find it thanks for the info healdem

Assuming all of these are web based then I'd just use PHP and MySQL as the database. Both are free. Both are probably already installed for you on your server (use XAMPP if you want to install on your PC). If you want pretty applications running on your PC then Java is fine (and free). I find all the OO stuff in Java a bit weird - but I'm ancient.

The reference to "fleabay" is a joke that really means eBay - New & used electronics, cars, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods & more at low prices which is the largest auction site I have ever seen.

I'd strongly suggest that you snoop about at Education to see what is available there. You (or your teachers) might be able to get educational discounts that make the Microsoft tools more available. Microsoft's top Australian management staff are keenly interested in education (that is their background), and work hard to make Microsoft products available to schools and students.

Mike has a good point, the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl or PHP) software is free, and in many ways it is as good as the equivalent Microsoft products. Most businesses still use Microsoft products so those skills are critical for earning a living in todays market, but at fourteen you've got a couple of years before you need to worry about that and a person can learn an amazing amount in a few years!

-PatP

Hi everyone,
I'm also new here in your famous website \o/
it seems to be a very interesting one
well, i'm not fourteen like the LittleEngineer ^^, i'm just twenty-three, it's the reason why i'm posting here my first message, i've received a post that wishs me "happy birthday", it was nice ^_^ thanks a lot.
I think that it doesn't matter how old we are, we should just encourage the use of all these free technologies because it's accessible for all people who can't have enough to buy such expensive licence, just in order to learn...
i wish that i didn't make a lot of mistakes because i'm not familiar with english, sorry lol
i'm from morocco ^^

best regards

Are you still there? I only ask because I was born in Canberra, so I'm "from Australia" myself. (I've lived in the States for 29 of my 31 years, incidentally, so I consider myself a Yank.) Anyhow, welcome to the forum.

A good language for new programmers is Python. Now, don't get me wrong, VB is a perfectly good language and I've done plenty of VB programming. But people who have only done languages like VB don't realize how they've been stuck in a tiny little box. Have a look at list comprehension in Python or generators and ask yourself how you might do that in VB or PHP.

(Maybe we could even petition the management to add a Python forum. Perl's not the only scripting language that does DBMS access.)

You should also try to learn some of the niche languages. Being 14, you can just soak up a this stuff that an adult learner would have a very hard time with. Many of the new features in "mainstream" languages like VB are often coming out of these languages 20 years later. LISP, Haskell, Caml, Prolog are some examples of languages that have a totally different way of looking at things. And hit the math, too. There's not a lot of math in programming *directly*, but, again, it's a way of thinking that allows you to do things other people simply won't be able to think of.

Hi,

i am new too.