Philip Buuck

Do you want to become a programmer but have no experience?  If you go to Barnes and Noble and look at the programming books you are going to find dozens upon dozens of books, everything from ‘Learn {language of the day} in 21 Days’ kinds of books to dense post-doctoral dissertations.  The worst part is that all of these books are going to be pricey – it’s hard to find anything of value for less than $25.

Game Programming Takes A Serious Education
Here’s the beef with game programming: you need to have a deep education of computer science to be good at it. The biggest reason for this is that performance is always going to be an issue with the work you do, moreso than any other programming job you will ever have. Correctness is the main goal of your typical Java app – so long as it works, you can worry about speed if it really becomes a problem later on down the road. Having code that is easy to maintain over the long haul is much more important.

This is just as important for a game developer, but having a system that runs as fast as possible becomes another mandatory requirement. You need to understand the underlying structure of your program to the point that you have it running as smoothly and quickly as you possibly can. You are going to spend some major time learning how to find bottlenecks and fix them.

However, for now, we just need an introduction to programming before worrying about that sort of complex computer science. One step at a time – learn how to create programs first.

The most basic programming – the first thing you are going to want to focus on – is to learn how to program C. The C programming language is as low level as high level languages get, and because you are going to want to become familiar with this low level work, this is a great place to start. Even if you only want to create games on smartphones, which is usually done in Java and keeps you from being low level at all, you will want to understand this basic architecture.