Experience is not measured by only years. Experience is based on how much you interact with what you know and what you don't know. There is no such thing as only "10-20 + year coding veterans" can teach, or should teach. Having 10 years of coding experience but trying nothing new in those 10 years or working is same as having no experience at all. Lets take a look at an example. One programmer dedicates 3 hours every day to code for 10 years while other spends 6 hours every day for 5 years. Can you still say that one with 10 years of experience is more 'experienced'?
When someone says they have X years of experience, they usually mean industry experience, as in this is their job for 40 or so hours a week. I wouldn't count personal or side projects in that, only things done in a professional capacity or to some professional level of standards.
Design principles are not hard to learn once you know java.
You say that, but there's an incredible number of people being paid to write code who know basically nothing of design principles. They're not really taught in schools, either, in my experience. Every recent graduate I've come into contact with has been entirely ignorant of them.
Content-wise, the homepage is entirely redundant with the top menu. There's nothing it has that the menu doesn't.
The content needs to be centered. It's not, currently. It's being moved to the right by the crumbs on the left. Those need to take up space that would not otherwise be reserved for content. There's a ton of space on each side, so there's no reason why the main content needs to get pushed over. For mobile browsers, I would put the crumbs above the main content rather than to the side. In that format, the content needs to fill the screen. You don't have room for sidebars.
I find it interesting that your logo has a ton of whitespace on either side that is indistinguishable from the rest of the banner except for the fact that it's a link. When coming in from the right, it's weird that this random bit of white is a link. This is more pronounced when the banner is in the smaller mode. There's just this great big field of clickable whitespace. The logo just seems so small and in the middle of nowhere. It would be just fine, better even, to have it nestled in the corner where it belongs. 15 or 20 pixels of padding is all it needs to make it look like it's not jammed up in there.
Why do your buttons say "click"? Do you think they don't look enough like buttons? Do you think we don't know what to do with button? The real question here is why those buttons are there at all. Why not make the div that encapsulates the text a clickable thing (with the correct cursor and all) and just put a light border around it that darkens when we mouse over it to convey that it is indeed clickable.
The bit where the top banner gets smaller is a bit rough when it expands again. I never like it when that sort of thing messes with the positioning of other elements. It's fine when it minimizes, but not so much when it expands again.
The picture slideshow on the portfolio page should stay the same height/width regardless of what picture it's showing. Like half the page disappears when it displays that animated gif. It's jarring and will leave the user wondering what just happened.
What version of Intel HD graphics is it using? What operating system more exactly? While unsure, I would recommend
The Binding of Isaac (Both Original and Rebirth)
The original Binding of Isaac actually doesn't run very well on Intel Integrated graphics with a low-powered processor. Flash sucks in that regard. I'm not sure how Rebirth runs, but I'm guessing it does better since it doesn't use Flash.
As for classes not being objects, correct me if I'm wrong, but all user defined classes inherit from the Object supertype in Java (and most other languages that support the OO Paradigm).
A class is the object type, where methods and properties are defined. An object is an instance of a class, an actual thing in memory. Objects have a type. That type is the class they're instantiating.
Java is more fun and also potentially confusing because each object you make is paired with an instance of the Class class, and you can directly refer to that Class object in the code (using the getClass() method) allowing you to use the reflection methods contained within. At the same time, you can refer to the class itself (accessing the .class property of an object or just the class name), allowing you to access static methods of that class.
It makes a huge difference when you use it as a boot drive! Win 8.1 on an SSD with a decently-fast system will boot to usable from cold in under 15 seconds. It's glorious.
Visual Studio is the most polished, feature-rich, and easy-to-use IDE there is hands down. I really wish I could work on Java in it.
Eclipse isn't bad. IBM had a hand in it, after all. I don't really like using it for anything but Java, though.
NetBeans is, in my opinion, easier to use than Eclipse but worse in every other way.
For C++, I always liked DevC++ because it was easier to use even though not nearly as feature rich as other IDEs. It's been a while since I've done any C++ programming, though.
How difficult is C++? Also I have microsoft visual studio 2014 from dreamspark also.
C++ is a bit harder to pick up than other languages because it's pretty strict about its syntax and it has a few weird language conventions that you don't see in any more modern languages (separate function declarations and implementations, for instance; or the entire idea of a preprocessor). It's also one of the few languages that brazenly gives you access to pointers, which can be confusing to new programmers, but it's not hard to simply not use them until you're ready.
Mostly, the language doesn't attempt to protect you from any pitfalls you might encounter. In Java, if you go out of bounds of an array, it'll throw and error at you telling you what happened. If you do that in C++, you access some random part of memory and use or corrupt whatever value is there, leading to unexpected behavior. Or maybe you'll get a segmentation fault. You never know!
As you get deeper into C++, there appear numerous complex concepts that don't appear in most modern languages and can take a lot of getting used to, but can be very powerful when applied properly. Templates are something you find an incarnation of in many languages. Template metaprogramming (allowing for compile-time execution of select bits of code) is not. References are something you find in every modern language (though they're usually handled transparently). Handles (a reference of a reference), and the associated loss of type safety, are not.
Put simply, C++ is a deep, deep language to get into. Many modern languages are like kiddie pools with lifeguards, but that's not the case with C++. There's no difficulty in dipping your feet in, but if dive in all at once, you're gonna drown.
I don't get the point of game programming courses. By learning programming and software design in general, you should be able to program games regardless. You don't need special courses to tell you how to do that. Maybe they're courses that introduce you to some frameworks and APIs? I don't know, but I wouldn't pay umpteen hundred dollars to learn something I can do myself as a side project.
3D graphics programming is a different beast. Take a course in that if you wish. Prepare for linear algebra like it's nobody's business.
Also note that game programming is such a miniscule part of the industry, one that's notorious for overworking and underpaying. There's an order of magnitude more jobs in web application development.
I've always have had a interest in webdesign but I mostly want to create applications.
Why not do both? Be a full-stack developer!
I'm currently more of a back-end developer than anything, but we don't have any dedicated front-end people at my company, so I end up doing that sort of work, too. I'm technically proficient with HTML/CSS and JavaScript, but the things I make aren't pretty since I'm the furthest thing from a graphic designer that you could imagine. I think I opened up Photoshop once.
I prefer to do software design work, but I don't have any jr developers to boss around and indoctrinate, so I have to implement everything I design. That part is less fun : /
It's a static method defined within the class1 class. It's just a different flavor of method that's defined within the class itself rather than an instance of that class.
Still, the main point is that beginners shouldn't have to worry about the difference between functions and methods.
Or as all of the tutorials I've seen call it, a method, despite the fact that they aren't the same thing.
Well in Java, basically all functions are gonna be called methods because basically everything is contained within objects. This kinda makes it not the best language to start in because Objects are central to Java's design and so there ends up being a lot of unexplained boilerplate in beginning tutorials, a whole bunch of "put this here because I said so, you'll understand later". I don't like that.
The best solution is to, of course, not use the $GLOBALS array and simply forget it exists because it's disgusting. My PHP is a little rusty, but I'm not sure that the $GLOBALS array works like you think it does.
$GLOBALS, to my knowledge, won't keep data across separate page posts (that's the job of $_SESSION). Every time you submit the page, the array will get wiped. It's merely an index of all variables currently defined in the global scope. Since you're not working inside of any functions, everything you do is defined in the global scope anyways (since if blocks don't have their own scope in PHP) so there's no real reason to use $GLOBALS at all in your code.
Let me give you an example of how you'd go about using $GLOBALS
Without the $GLOBALS array, the function incrementFoo would not be able to access the $foo variable because $foo was declared outside of the incrementFoo function. Indeed, it was declared outside of any function, putting it in the global scope.
The code should output the following:
1
2
So the main point of the $GLOBALS array is so you can access outside variables that you for some reason don't feel like passing in as parameters to functions, perhaps because you desire side effects such as those shown in my example (this makes you a bad programmer and a bad person).
If you want to keep data across page submits, use the $_SESSION array.
Not having anything to lose is probably the safest way to prevent it from happening.
There is that old adage: It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
When my mom died, the realization of exactly what that meant took a while to sink in. I missed her then, and I still do, but I still have a life to live, and so I moved on. It took a while to get used to her not being around any more, but being sad about it didn't do me any good at the time, so I merely adapted to life without her. All memories fade as time goes on, and I found my memories of her drifting away like any other, getting more distant and distorted every day. Mine were especially distant because she suffered from dementia, and my more recent memories had her in a state very much unlike herself; the person I knew as my Mom had disappeared years before her actual death, consumed by an unstoppable cognitive degenerative disease. That is why I find it's best to, while I still have them, use these memories to celebrate her life and her person rather than mourn her death.
Do not regret the passing of a loved one. Instead remember them fondly and be happy that they lived the life they did.
0
When someone says they have X years of experience, they usually mean industry experience, as in this is their job for 40 or so hours a week. I wouldn't count personal or side projects in that, only things done in a professional capacity or to some professional level of standards.
0
You say that, but there's an incredible number of people being paid to write code who know basically nothing of design principles. They're not really taught in schools, either, in my experience. Every recent graduate I've come into contact with has been entirely ignorant of them.
Temporal coupling, temporal coupling everywhere!
0
The content needs to be centered. It's not, currently. It's being moved to the right by the crumbs on the left. Those need to take up space that would not otherwise be reserved for content. There's a ton of space on each side, so there's no reason why the main content needs to get pushed over. For mobile browsers, I would put the crumbs above the main content rather than to the side. In that format, the content needs to fill the screen. You don't have room for sidebars.
I find it interesting that your logo has a ton of whitespace on either side that is indistinguishable from the rest of the banner except for the fact that it's a link. When coming in from the right, it's weird that this random bit of white is a link. This is more pronounced when the banner is in the smaller mode. There's just this great big field of clickable whitespace. The logo just seems so small and in the middle of nowhere. It would be just fine, better even, to have it nestled in the corner where it belongs. 15 or 20 pixels of padding is all it needs to make it look like it's not jammed up in there.
Why do your buttons say "click"? Do you think they don't look enough like buttons? Do you think we don't know what to do with button? The real question here is why those buttons are there at all. Why not make the div that encapsulates the text a clickable thing (with the correct cursor and all) and just put a light border around it that darkens when we mouse over it to convey that it is indeed clickable.
The bit where the top banner gets smaller is a bit rough when it expands again. I never like it when that sort of thing messes with the positioning of other elements. It's fine when it minimizes, but not so much when it expands again.
The picture slideshow on the portfolio page should stay the same height/width regardless of what picture it's showing. Like half the page disappears when it displays that animated gif. It's jarring and will leave the user wondering what just happened.
0
The original Binding of Isaac actually doesn't run very well on Intel Integrated graphics with a low-powered processor. Flash sucks in that regard. I'm not sure how Rebirth runs, but I'm guessing it does better since it doesn't use Flash.
0
A class is the object type, where methods and properties are defined. An object is an instance of a class, an actual thing in memory. Objects have a type. That type is the class they're instantiating.
Java is more fun and also potentially confusing because each object you make is paired with an instance of the Class class, and you can directly refer to that Class object in the code (using the getClass() method) allowing you to use the reflection methods contained within. At the same time, you can refer to the class itself (accessing the .class property of an object or just the class name), allowing you to access static methods of that class.
0
0
Eclipse isn't bad. IBM had a hand in it, after all. I don't really like using it for anything but Java, though.
NetBeans is, in my opinion, easier to use than Eclipse but worse in every other way.
For C++, I always liked DevC++ because it was easier to use even though not nearly as feature rich as other IDEs. It's been a while since I've done any C++ programming, though.
For most other things, I just use NotePad++
0
C++ is a bit harder to pick up than other languages because it's pretty strict about its syntax and it has a few weird language conventions that you don't see in any more modern languages (separate function declarations and implementations, for instance; or the entire idea of a preprocessor). It's also one of the few languages that brazenly gives you access to pointers, which can be confusing to new programmers, but it's not hard to simply not use them until you're ready.
Mostly, the language doesn't attempt to protect you from any pitfalls you might encounter. In Java, if you go out of bounds of an array, it'll throw and error at you telling you what happened. If you do that in C++, you access some random part of memory and use or corrupt whatever value is there, leading to unexpected behavior. Or maybe you'll get a segmentation fault. You never know!
As you get deeper into C++, there appear numerous complex concepts that don't appear in most modern languages and can take a lot of getting used to, but can be very powerful when applied properly. Templates are something you find an incarnation of in many languages. Template metaprogramming (allowing for compile-time execution of select bits of code) is not. References are something you find in every modern language (though they're usually handled transparently). Handles (a reference of a reference), and the associated loss of type safety, are not.
Put simply, C++ is a deep, deep language to get into. Many modern languages are like kiddie pools with lifeguards, but that's not the case with C++. There's no difficulty in dipping your feet in, but if dive in all at once, you're gonna drown.
0
*not literally nobody, but Java is far more used for web development, especially in the enterprise sphere.
1
3D graphics programming is a different beast. Take a course in that if you wish. Prepare for linear algebra like it's nobody's business.
Also note that game programming is such a miniscule part of the industry, one that's notorious for overworking and underpaying. There's an order of magnitude more jobs in web application development.
0
Why not do both? Be a full-stack developer!
I'm currently more of a back-end developer than anything, but we don't have any dedicated front-end people at my company, so I end up doing that sort of work, too. I'm technically proficient with HTML/CSS and JavaScript, but the things I make aren't pretty since I'm the furthest thing from a graphic designer that you could imagine. I think I opened up Photoshop once.
I prefer to do software design work, but I don't have any jr developers to boss around and indoctrinate, so I have to implement everything I design. That part is less fun : /
0
Still, the main point is that beginners shouldn't have to worry about the difference between functions and methods.
0
Well in Java, basically all functions are gonna be called methods because basically everything is contained within objects. This kinda makes it not the best language to start in because Objects are central to Java's design and so there ends up being a lot of unexplained boilerplate in beginning tutorials, a whole bunch of "put this here because I said so, you'll understand later". I don't like that.
1
$GLOBALS, to my knowledge, won't keep data across separate page posts (that's the job of $_SESSION). Every time you submit the page, the array will get wiped. It's merely an index of all variables currently defined in the global scope. Since you're not working inside of any functions, everything you do is defined in the global scope anyways (since if blocks don't have their own scope in PHP) so there's no real reason to use $GLOBALS at all in your code.
Let me give you an example of how you'd go about using $GLOBALS
Without the $GLOBALS array, the function incrementFoo would not be able to access the $foo variable because $foo was declared outside of the incrementFoo function. Indeed, it was declared outside of any function, putting it in the global scope.
The code should output the following:
So the main point of the $GLOBALS array is so you can access outside variables that you for some reason don't feel like passing in as parameters to functions, perhaps because you desire side effects such as those shown in my example (this makes you a bad programmer and a bad person).
If you want to keep data across page submits, use the $_SESSION array.
0
There is that old adage: It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
When my mom died, the realization of exactly what that meant took a while to sink in. I missed her then, and I still do, but I still have a life to live, and so I moved on. It took a while to get used to her not being around any more, but being sad about it didn't do me any good at the time, so I merely adapted to life without her. All memories fade as time goes on, and I found my memories of her drifting away like any other, getting more distant and distorted every day. Mine were especially distant because she suffered from dementia, and my more recent memories had her in a state very much unlike herself; the person I knew as my Mom had disappeared years before her actual death, consumed by an unstoppable cognitive degenerative disease. That is why I find it's best to, while I still have them, use these memories to celebrate her life and her person rather than mourn her death.
Do not regret the passing of a loved one. Instead remember them fondly and be happy that they lived the life they did.