Alas, I didn't find what I was really looking for (very beginner hobbyist scripter to talk to about where to start)...but I enjoyed it hugely anyway, until the conversation at the end reminded me that scripting is really the province of Real Developers and Not Idiots Like Me...cause I didn't understand half of it!
[long boring bit about why I want to try it anyway] My approach for why I want to dip a cautious toe into scripting is that what put me off Windows was that there was an infinite amount of choice in software but it was so commercially-driven that if what you wanted to do wasn't commercial it wouldn't exist. The Windows approach is, if you want to do something that isn't there out of the box, buy something. So what you eventually end up with is infinite numbers of programs that do the same as the other programs. You end up with a range of choice that is five million fishknives when you opened the drawer for a soup spoon. I doubt I could become a big professional developer doing big things, ever. I could see myself one day (in five years' or so's time, if I'm lucky) doing tiny back- bedroom projects as shareware or open-source, that started out as what I felt frustrated by not having on my computer -- and gain small amounts of money and big amounts of fun!
My problem is that I feel very wary of talking to Professional Developers For Whom It Is Their Day Job. Not that they'd be at all unfriendly, but what would they gain from talking to Dumb Script Kiddie Who Iz A Idiot, as opposed to what I would gain, which is education and which I have the uneasy feeling I should actually be paying for (except that whenever I look up IT training I see big commercial operations that charge £700 for a week's training... which isn't really what I'm looking for). And I know Adrian's approach is that computer science courses at school (what I'd probably get if I looked at adult-ed, except the adult-ed courses aren't up yet at Suffolk College?) are generally rubbish at teaching people to program, and he's much brighter than I am. And I know my past is littered with failed attempts to learn simple programming (C++, VB, Delphi, XSLT...), which lasted until I tripped over Applescript when I switched, downloaded a bunch of free scripts, and managed to get over the mental block that there was nothing I wanted to *do* that I could find out how to do in real programming. So I'm at the point where I want to take a bit of a step back from clipping Mac apps together and come back to it later, and start more from-the-ground- up. But I don't want to bother Real Professional Developers because, they have coding at their day job and almost certainly don't want to give me a free education in their spare time (I get the feeling poor Adrian doesn't, especially since his spare-time recreation is currently rock-climbing and coding is his Work). And I certainly couldn't pay for an expensive education, especially the hundreds-of- pounds one!)
So I'll go back to doing scripting on my own, reading books and posting snippets of bad code on the internet...
(Incidentally, if anybody wants to read my silly personal-reactions- to-starting-scripting blog, it's at macrubyist.livejournal.com but so far it has about 4 readers. Am uneasily beginning to wonder if I'm not *quite* as chatty & entertaining as I think I am. And I have a bit of a problem with being *too* chatty and discursive, viz this note)
[end boring bit about me, sorry, was a bit of a vent there but I just feel so *isolated* sometimes!]
OTOH, the general idea that I could use the local Mac user groups for my consumer/user chatting and questions (about Mac-specific apps) and ALUG for geek-fu social chatting, validation that using Unix isn't actually Completely Insane, and learning about the open-source end of Darwin, sounds like it would work marvellously. And if anybody could help me sort out my Samba mixed-network problem that all Mac users look blankly at and say But It Just Works (even if it involves Pain & use of CUPS), that would be cool, although suspect that will have to wait until the About Mixed Networks meeting.
Suspect am out on a limb a bit -- may be the only person in the entire universe who's too geeky to be *quite* a Mac-consumer and too dumb to be *quite* a winux lizard :-)
But thanks for listening, anyway. I promise I'll start to shut up now, but suspect needed to vent after having nobody to talk to F2F about what I was thinking about for the last six months (as in, Adrian doesn't want to talk about Evil Devil-Languages, and has seen me fail a bunch of times at learning programming anyway, none of my friends do this stuff, and I've never found any hobbyist programmers at the same Dumb But Finally Actually Enthusiastic stage I'm at now...)
R
On 19-Jun-07 16:20:24, Ruth Bygrave wrote:
[Lots of relevant stuff snipped, but leaving the main point]:
Suspect am out on a limb a bit -- may be the only person in the entire universe who's too geeky to be *quite* a Mac-consumer and too dumb to be *quite* a winux lizard :-)
In passing: was "winux" a result of a Mac keyboard, or is it a hint about how you react to Linux and stuff?
Anyway: Scripting in Linux is something lots of us do, mostly in small doses, who are a long way from Doing It For Our Job. In fact we're mostly amateurs who've accumulated little increments over the years, and are beginning to get it together, Nonetheless, we get stuff done, we understand what it's like getting started, and mostly we don't try to be clever (and mostly we couldn't be, anyway).
So fire away. If there's something you'd like to try but don't see how, just bring it up on the list. And, yes, do look at books and things. "Linux in a Nutshell" is a handy reference compendium when you want to look things up, and for scripting see especially Ch 4: "bash: The Bourne Again Shell". But in real life it's better to develop your scripts in the context of something *you* want to achieve, and ask questions as they come up while you're trying to do that.
Standing by ...
Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 19-Jun-07 Time: 17:47:34 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
Suspect am out on a limb a bit -- may be the only person in the entire universe who's too geeky to be *quite* a Mac-consumer and too dumb to be *quite* a winux lizard :-)
In passing: was "winux" a result of a Mac keyboard, or is it a hint about how you react to Linux and stuff?
Sorry = linux wizard spoonerised!
Anyway: Scripting in Linux is something lots of us do, mostly in small doses, who are a long way from Doing It For Our Job. In fact we're mostly amateurs who've accumulated little increments over the years, and are beginning to get it together, Nonetheless, we get stuff done, we understand what it's like getting started, and mostly we don't try to be clever (and mostly we couldn't be, anyway).
That's probably the level I'm at, actually...
So fire away. If there's something you'd like to try but don't see how, just bring it up on the list. And, yes, do look at books and things. "Linux in a Nutshell" is a handy reference
real life it's better to develop your scripts in the context of something *you* want to achieve, and ask questions as they come up while you're trying to do that.
That's the only approach that ever made sense to me so far! And it's a good explanation of why trying to learn Windows-style programming never made much sense to me: every time I thought of a simple project I wanted to do, I'd get told it was Bad & Wrong...
As I say, the fact that I now feel more Validated as a Part-Time Geek is absolutely wonderful...
Regards, Ruth
On Tue, Jun 19, 2007 at 05:47:51PM +0100, Ted Harding wrote:
So fire away. If there's something you'd like to try but don't see how, just bring it up on the list. And, yes, do look at books and things. "Linux in a Nutshell" is a handy reference compendium when you want to look things up, and for scripting see especially Ch 4: "bash: The Bourne Again Shell". But in real life it's better to develop your scripts in the context of something *you* want to achieve, and ask questions as they come up while you're trying to do that.
A really good book for shell scripting is "Classic Shell Scripting" published by O'Reilly, written by Arnold Robbins & Nelson H.F.Beebe.
It was published in 2005 so is up to date but covers all the crufty old unix stuff too. I'd highly recommend it.
I'd review it, but i've not finished reading it yet ;)
Adam
On 19/06/07, Ruth Bygrave rbygrave@ntlworld.com wrote:
My problem is that I feel very wary of talking to Professional Developers For Whom It Is Their Day Job. Not that they'd be at all unfriendly, but what would they gain from talking to Dumb Script Kiddie Who Iz A Idiot,
You can not over estimate the ego of a developer. There are newsgroups, forums, etc. out there specifically designed for egotistical professionals to show off just how much they know by offering assistance to the new kids on the block.
So I'll go back to doing scripting on my own, reading books and posting snippets of bad code on the internet...
It's the best way. Find a problem you want to solve, find a tool, and then just start. When you get stuck, find a forum/newsgroup, and ask away. The more polite professionals try to keep the sarcasm out of their reply, but don't get bugged down by it. Not every one knows everything.
I've never found any hobbyist programmers at the same Dumb But Finally Actually Enthusiastic stage I'm at now...)
FWIW, that's how I started, albeit on a BBC micro a few (ahem) years ago.
Greg
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