> The top-down approach means you truly understand nothing until a year or so down the line.
Is that really true? I think my language ordering went something like: qbasic, perl, visual basic, python/c, php,<others>, more c, c++, <others>
So strictly speaking it was at least a year or two before I learned C for the first time. However, while I certainly wasn't as well informed as I am now, I wasn't completely clueless. I knew that the things I was doing in perl were actually allocating memory, that perl was helping me with lots of book keeping, that there were things called pointers that pointed to things, etc.
I might not have actually worked in detail with the concepts yet, but I did have an idea that there was something below what I was working with. I think that by bearing that in mind, I was able to 1) know that I would have to learn the 'hardcore' stuff eventually and 2) focus on the actual programming, in the sense of making the computer do what I wanted.
Is that really true? I think my language ordering went something like: qbasic, perl, visual basic, python/c, php,<others>, more c, c++, <others>
So strictly speaking it was at least a year or two before I learned C for the first time. However, while I certainly wasn't as well informed as I am now, I wasn't completely clueless. I knew that the things I was doing in perl were actually allocating memory, that perl was helping me with lots of book keeping, that there were things called pointers that pointed to things, etc.
I might not have actually worked in detail with the concepts yet, but I did have an idea that there was something below what I was working with. I think that by bearing that in mind, I was able to 1) know that I would have to learn the 'hardcore' stuff eventually and 2) focus on the actual programming, in the sense of making the computer do what I wanted.