Don't suppose it's possible without a LOT of programming prowess (how's that term!), but WOULD it be possible to make the board censor regular posts and not IM's?? I know you'd never do it, but would it be possible??
One should be careful about what he/she thinks is possible or what he/she thinks we might or might not do because 1) allowing members to turn off word censoring for PM's is not only very possible, thanks to the way the SMF developers have designed this system, it would be quite easy to program, and 2) I can install that option later today.
Hey MB.....I have a book and some disks that are supposed to teach the programming language 'C' in 21 days. Heh heh - sure.
I was thinking of trying to learn how to write a simple program. Is that a good/useful/not too difficult language to attempt learning??
Well, the simple answer is that anyone who was good in Math in school, meaning they have good logic skills, has the potential to be a programmer. Generally, the first class a programming student starts with is a full semester of
Programming: Logic, Design and Implementation. Being a Computer Programming teacher, I suppose I'm a bit prejudiced, so, no matter how well a book might be written (and I think I'm familiar with the book you might be talking about, and I'll concide that it is well written), I find it very hard to imagine that any book that promises to make someone a programmer in 21 days is equivalent to that course. However, that being said, such a book can certainly be a great way to get one's feet wet, so to speak.
C and its derivatives, C++ and C#, are widely taught nowadays, because so many other programming languages are based on or derived from them and because programs written in C and C++ can be ported to any operating system with little or no modifications necessary (C# is a Microsoft variation
). The C family of languages don't really have much of a use on the Web - they're mostly used for writing software. However, three languages that are based or derived from the C family: Perl, Java and PHP are widely used on the Web, particularly the latter two. An understanding of C comes in very handy when one wants to learn any of those three.
So, I guess what I'm saying is that you should definitely give the book a shot. If you find that you like it, who knows where you might move on to from there?
(One program that I can pretty much guarantee that you'll find in the book is the infamous Hello World program because variations of it are almost always the first example that's used to teach any programming language. In C/C++, it should look something like this:
#include <iostream.h>
int main ()
{
cout << "Hello World!";
return 0;
}
Have fun!
)