New to Programming

[Stewart Gordon]

Walter Prescott wrote:
> Greetings,

Welcome.

> I realize that my questions might come across as somewhat silly 
> considering that this is a forum for programmers not �newbies,� so to 
> speak. I apologize ahead of time if I offend anyone but I�ll gladly 
> appreciate any assistance I receive.

"I?ll"?  You could do with a better newsreader.  Or failing that, 
sticking to plain ASCII quotation marks/apostrophes rather than fancy ones.

(Almost any newsreader is better than a web interface, which appears to 
be what you're using, but that's far from the only reason.)

But anyway....

> With little to no programming experience I�d like to get into 
> programming. I�m somewhat experienced with running server and client 
> side variations of the windows operating system and mainly client 
> operations on linux distributions. The only programming languages I 
> know are Markup Languages such as HTML/XML and its subset AIML (for 
> fun, and yet AI has its limitations in a Markup language whereas 
> implementation in a solid programming language might be better).

First things first, HTML isn't a programming language - it's just a 
means of describing the content and structure of a document.  By writing 
HTML, you are no more "programming" than you would be by typing a letter 
or essay in MS Word.  See also:

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/prog.html

<snip>
> The truth is I�ve tried to learn C and C++ in the past and found 
> working with them difficult, still I�m open for anything. I found 
> Python easier due to the fact that it was interpreter based and yet 
> it was extremely restrictive as far as what I could do, if that makes 
> sense. I heard D mixes elements of C/C++ and Python which sounds cool 
> to me (all-in-one is really what I�m looking for).

D has things in common with a few C-like languages - Java and C# to name 
a few more.  That said, I don't know C# so I can't really compare D with 
it....

<snip>
> Is extensive Math knowledge required for programming languages? Is it 
> required to learn the bare minimum of D? Or is D only for really 
> advanced C/C++ programmers?

If you know C or any C-like language fairly well, then you should be 
able to get used to D without much trouble.  I don't really know the 
best way to learn D otherwise, but you could try some of the tutorials 
out there.

http://www.dmoz.org/Computers/Programming/Languages/D/

> Currently in my possession are the Schaum�s Outlines books Data
> Structures with C++ and Programming with C++.
> 
> I would greatly appreciate anyone willing to give me pointers when it
> comes to programming languages, what to expect with D, what I�ll be
> able to do with D, and the type of knowledge required to initially
> get into the language. Please feel free to email me or contact me via
> the forums.

Much of what you're asking can be found here:

http://www.digitalmars.com/d/overview.html

Stewart.