So you want to program?

...well this might be a bit of help

As I'm not the Goddess of HTML, I have to have some other talent, right? You -do-! You're the Pretzel goddess! Pretzels are your specialty! ;) BTW, nice page title. ~Goddess of HTML~ Here's my list of important things to consider about programming in C++.

1. Computers are extremely dumb. Anything you write has to have about 16 more steps that you would think are necessary.

2. Computer science majors are strange (which I can say because I am not one). After a while they forget how normal people talk, so when you try to compile your program (before you can run it), none of the errors will be intelligible.

3. Relating to that, the error message will never be "you forgot a semicolon", but rather something along the lines of "Line 15: missing delimeter before a." The end result is usually that you forgot a semicolon.

4. In C++, "if" does not have a "then". Don't ask, I guess.

5. Write lots of functions, so you don't have to copy and paste code over. It's really annoying to try to find the same error in 6 different places.

6. You can accomplish the same thing several different ways, but some are decidedly better than others. From experience, when you've written 3 while loops that are all looping through the same set of numbers, it's probably safe to combine them.

7. Sadly, you can't make a lot of terribly fun text-based games (or at least, I can't). As cool as it is to play tic-tac-toe using a multidimensional array, it gets pretty boring after a while.

8. In every program that you write there will be at least one really stupid mistake that will take you forever to figure out. When you finally realize that it was a stupid typo on your part, you feel like screaming. It is incredibly annoying.

9. Despite the fact that pair programming is faster than single programming, pair programming only works well if the pairs are both on the same level. Otherwise, one can only work as fast as the slowest pair-*if* you are doing pair programming correctly.

10. In the end, one semester of programming will not be sufficient for you to programm efficiently. Fortunately, you will be capable of writing really terrible MATLAB code that works, but you can't decipher again later.

11. C++ is kind of fun to learn, but is somewhat less useful than Javascript or Visual Basic where you can make pretty things.