Groups | Search | Server Info | Keyboard shortcuts | Login | Register [http] [https] [nntp] [nntps]

Groups > comp.lang.java.programmer > #38050

Re: programming...?

Show all headers | View raw

On Tue, 20 Feb 2018 12:10:27 -0800, Eric Douglas wrote:

> On Tuesday, February 20, 2018 at 2:37:57 PM UTC-5, Kiwi User wrote:
>> ANSI C is useful. I'd suggest learning it from "The C Programing
>> Language" by Kernighan and Richie, 2nd edition because thats about the
>> best written and most enjoyable book about a programming language I've
>> seen. Another useful book is "The Practise of Programming by Kernighan
>> and Pike. This is about writing readable programs that are easy to
>> maintain and debug and, although targeted on C and its derivatives, the
>> advise and guidance it contains is applicable to other programming
>> languages too.
>> 
>> 
> books?  people still read books??
>
Yep. I started professional programming (ICL mainframes in assembler and 
COBOL) in 1968 when books were all there was. You may well prefer to use 
a screen but I still find a well written reference book much quicker to 
use than a screen. I would use an eBook if I could find one with four 
displays arranged like two pages, so it can display the contents page, 
two facing pages of text and the index at once.

> I bought a big book once like 3" thick supposed to have everything you 
> need to know to be a SQL DBA, not sure how many pages I got through.  
> Just reading was the dry-est thing ever.  I can't imagine learning
> anything about coding by reading.  Any such reading material would have
> to have hands on, read it then do something on the computer and see
> it in action.
>
Just because a book is thick doesn't mean its any good - in fact its 
sheer thickness may well mean that the author can't write and his
editor was an incompetent idiot.

The C book I recommended is a little over A5 size, 13mm thick and 272 
pages including a good index.

> I have worked with Goldmine (CRM), quite possibly the ugliest SQL
> database design ever.  It has tables with record type fields to include
> multiple definitions for a field of a table.  It has a record link field
> with split fields, so you can pull half an email address from a field
> then join the table to itself to get the rest of it from a different
> field in a different record.  Yeah, fun times.
> 
Never seen anything that bad. The best database design tools I've seen 
have all come from Embacadero. I'm currently checking out Mogwai for use 
when we start to rationalise my gliding club's accounting and management 
systems. So far looks fairly good. Its FOSS, written in Java, draws a 
decent ERD and reverse engineered my e-mail archive database in a flash 
(lots of data but not many tables) 

SquirrelSQL is also pretty for what it does, another Java tool, but it 
isn't a database design tool, more a fancy tool for doing DBA maintenance 
type stuff and interactively developing complex SQL queries. 

> So still a little fuzzy on things like inner join versus outer join and
> exactly how and when to do them, and not much experience with things
> like create table, alter table, but I've done a fair amount of SQL
> queries and performance tuning.
>
I initially learnt by using IDMS, a network Codasyl database, which is 
where I picked up data analysys and normalisation, and later migrated 
then knowledge to RDBMS, with help from reading stuff written by C J 
Date, one of the SQL pioneers and a pretty good author. 

The rest I picked up by doing, which included rationalising horrid Access 
schemas developed by people who had no clue and then wondered why their 
DB was slow, and designing and then optimising star schema data 
warehouses, so its good to know that at least a few others have come up 
along similar routes.
  

-- 
Martin    | martin at
Gregorie  | gregorie dot org

Back to comp.lang.java.programmer | Previous | Next — Previous in thread | Next in thread | Find similar | Unroll thread

Thread

programming...? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2018-02-20 07:38 -0800
  Re: programming...? Jon <jon101011@yahoo.com> - 2018-02-20 17:07 +0100
    Re: programming...? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2018-02-20 08:19 -0800
      Re: programming...? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2018-02-20 11:45 -0500
        Re: programming...? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2018-02-20 12:39 -0800
          Re: programming...? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2018-02-20 13:25 -0800
            Re: programming...? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2018-02-20 14:00 -0800
            Re: programming...? Daniele Futtorovic <da.futt.news@laposte.net> - 2018-02-21 00:31 +0100
            Re: programming...? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2018-02-20 19:24 -0500
          Re: programming...? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2018-02-20 19:21 -0500
  Re: programming...? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2018-02-20 11:41 -0500
  Re: programming...? Kiwi User <martin@mydomain.invalid> - 2018-02-20 19:37 +0000
    Re: programming...? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2018-02-20 12:10 -0800
      Re: programming...? Kiwi User <martin@mydomain.invalid> - 2018-02-20 22:00 +0000
  Re: programming...? Robert Spanjaard <spamtrap@arumes.com> - 2018-02-20 21:09 +0100
    Re: programming...? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2018-02-20 12:16 -0800
      Re: programming...? Kiwi User <martin@mydomain.invalid> - 2018-02-20 22:09 +0000
        Re: programming...? Robert Spanjaard <spamtrap@arumes.com> - 2018-02-21 01:16 +0100
          Re: programming...? Kiwi User <martin@mydomain.invalid> - 2018-02-21 00:47 +0000
            Re: programming...? Robert Spanjaard <spamtrap@arumes.com> - 2018-02-21 12:29 +0100
              Re: programming...? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2018-02-21 10:42 -0500
              Re: programming...? Kiwi User <martin@mydomain.invalid> - 2018-02-21 15:44 +0000
                Re: programming...? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2018-02-21 11:03 -0500
                Re: programming...? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2018-02-21 08:38 -0800
                Re: programming...? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2018-02-21 11:54 -0500
                Re: programming...? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2018-02-21 10:40 -0800
                Re: programming...? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2018-02-21 14:35 -0500
                Re: programming...? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2018-02-21 11:48 -0800
                Re: programming...? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2018-02-21 08:29 -0800
                Re: programming...? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2018-02-21 11:47 -0500
                Re: programming...? Kiwi User <martin@mydomain.invalid> - 2018-02-21 17:35 +0000
                Re: programming...? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2018-02-21 12:47 -0500
                Re: programming...? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2018-02-21 10:45 -0800
                Re: programming...? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2018-02-21 14:40 -0500
                Re: programming...? Kiwi User <martin@mydomain.invalid> - 2018-02-21 21:23 +0000
                Re: programming...? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2018-02-21 21:39 -0500
                Re: programming...? Kiwi User <martin@mydomain.invalid> - 2018-02-22 09:06 +0000
                Re: programming...? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2018-02-24 20:29 -0500
                Re: programming...? Kiwi User <martin@mydomain.invalid> - 2018-02-25 02:12 +0000
                Re: programming...? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2018-02-26 08:19 -0800
                Re: programming...? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2018-03-01 13:17 -0500
                Re: programming...? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2018-02-21 10:43 -0800
                Re: programming...? Kiwi User <martin@mydomain.invalid> - 2018-02-21 21:14 +0000
                Re: programming...? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2018-02-21 21:35 -0500
                Re: programming...? Kiwi User <martin@mydomain.invalid> - 2018-02-22 09:10 +0000
                Re: programming...? Eric Douglas <e.d.programmer@gmail.com> - 2018-02-22 06:23 -0800
                Re: programming...? Arne Vajhøj <arne@vajhoej.dk> - 2018-02-22 19:32 -0500

csiph-web