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Learn to program with open source

Posted on 27 Apr 2010 at 14:43

Simon Brock guides you to the best open-source resources to learn programming

What about frameworks?

While a program that prints “Hello world” on the command line may be the quickest to write, all the applications that I spend my days writing open their own windows, and the leap from terminal programming to windows programming has always been hard to make.

To make it easier we have programming frameworks, which are kits of prefabricated window parts. If you know how to lay bricks you could build a house – you might need some design help from an architect and some bricklaying skills to ensure all the walls stay upright. An alternative is to buy prefabricated sections – walls, roofs, doors, windows – and assemble them into a house. It will almost certainly be quicker, but all your houses will look the same, and it won’t work for a fancy garden wall, where you’d still need a bricklayer.

Frameworks are just like that, and there are many examples for almost every language, especially for Java and other web-based languages. One I’ve often mentioned in this column is Ruby on Rails, a framework based on Ruby, but there are equally well-known ones for PHP, such as Cake and Zend. Using a framework can be helpful, and addictive, but using pre-fabricated parts may not give you exactly what you want under all circumstances.

Nevertheless, they can provide a great way into programming, because all the tricky bits you don’t want to face immediately have been done by someone else (and hopefully, they did them right). A good approach might be to learn to create iPhone apps using a web app toolkit, which enables you to create something tangible you can see immediately in the iPhone simulator, which unfortunately only works on the Mac.

Integrated Development Environments

To write real commercial programs you’ll want to use an IDE that combines an editor, a way to insert parts from a framework, and debugging tools under a single interface. Once upon a time simple IDEs existed, but if you look at today’s most popular offerings, such as Eclipse and Xcode, they’re anything but, and learning them is almost as lengthy as learning the language. There’s demand for a cut-down IDE that can be used along with an open-source book and a compiler to learn programming, but as far as I know it doesn’t exist.

The best you can manage today is a smart programmers’ editor that supports syntax colouring and lets you run your program code from inside it – jEdit, SciTE and Notepad++ are open-source examples available for Windows, Linux and Mac. Some of these can take you to the source line of an error, although that’s the limit of their debugging help.

There’s a huge amount of open-source resources on the web to help you learn to write programs, and hopefully I’ve steered you toward joining the next generation of open-source programmers.