Need Help Learning How To Program (I'm A Noob)

[warchild1987]

so here it is: i am a total noob to programming and i want to start doing Lua and XML. i've seen sites that show this and that, and "buy this book" or that one... the list goes on.

anyone have some advice on where to start? i have absolutely no experience in programming, but am enthusiastic in wanting to start. HELP ME!!!

[Slakah]

I learnt purely through,

http://lua-users.org/wiki/TutorialDirectory
http://www.lua.org/pil/ (this is a lot harder to digest than the lua-users tutorials but it's definitely useful)
http://www.wowwiki.com/Api

and poking around some of the simpler mods trying to figure out what made them tick.

Hope this helps.

[lingering]

while there starting to date, fara is ceraintly you can look at:

http://fara.webeddie.com/frames/
http://www.yetikitn.com/category/pro...don-tutorials/

[Vis]

Originally Posted by lingering http://www.yetikitn.com/category/pro...don-tutorials/

Wow. Very nice link. I just bookmarked that one, thank you No clue how I missed that in my resource searches.

[lingering]

I am supprised theres not more bear bones addons frame work for ppl to play with, I will make one sometime when i get bored.

[warchild1987]

thanks for the help guys. i love what im seeing. if there are any other suggestions, this noob wannabe programmer is down for anything THNX

[Xrystal]

My first steps into wow addon coding was the download from wows site itself. Its the equivalent to hello world for wow and shows your gold in a window.

I then progressed to reading through wowwiki's examples and reading through my less complex looking addons installed and tried to figure out what they did and how they did it.

Then finally I jumped right in and wrote my first plugin for nUI and then my first addon with a GUI and all that jazz. I'm still learning though as I find out how things work that I hadn't tried before.

[Verissi]

I did the same as most of the posters above me did - read a bunch on WoWWiki's Interface Customization portal, read a bunch of threads here, downloaded some simpler addons to study/tinker with, and then just picked an idea of my own and worked through it over time. To be fair, I have a programming background, so it was just learning the API and Lua syntax for me (and the limitations, which I'm still frustrated by sometimes).

Every time a friend asks about learning how to write addons, I usually start by telling them to pick a simple addon idea and approach their research from that perspective. There's a lot of information out there, but without something to focus on, it can get overwhelming fast and you may not have any frame of reference for what you're reading or how it all comes together.

Most of my friends learn better by doing than reading, so they seem to get going faster if they have a project in mind that they "learn while writing". Just don't get overambitious on your first project unless you have a lot of patience and time If you can find an existing addon that does something similar or related to your idea, you could download that and pick it apart locally to see what each line does...then just modify it to see if you can get it to do something different. Once you get to the point where you can "read" the code others write and feel comfortable modifying that, it gets much easier to write your own from scratch.

As you can tell, the folks here are a helpful bunch, so if you get stuck on something that isn't working, feel free to ask!

[Shooshting]

Nice to see people out there do actually look at my website ^^ (YetiKitn.com) I will admit the tutorials are starting to become dated now but should in the most part be valid.

In the interest of learning feel free to download any of my addons to poke around and learn from

Happy addon making and good luck!

[jonathon]

Originally Posted by Shooshting Nice to see people out there do actually look at my website ^^ (YetiKitn.com) I will admit the tutorials are starting to become dated now but should in the most part be valid. In the interest of learning feel free to download any of my addons to poke around and learn from Happy addon making and good luck!

just saw your site in one of the posts above... I LIKEY... bookmarked