OSDev.org

I found a site here:

http://www.vbtutor.net

I downloaded VB2012 (old version, I know) and I need your opinion at what point I should stop reading the tutorials and either practice with it or move onto something else, like C++.

In general you should find tutorials, books and documents that teach based on final projects made from everything we worked and learned in the book. In this way you can learn anything in no time.

Also do this:
- You could implement some WinAPI functions into Visual Basic (probably impractical due to the language), and most importantly take double advantage of your VB tutorials by translating the programs you're studying or that you like manually into C++ so you can understand it by reusing what you already did in Visual Basic. The opposite is also possible (learn Visual Basic by translating C++ programs into Visual Basic). In this way you will really take the most of any tutorial in any language.

- Read the book's questions, requests and problems, also read what is needed to be done where it gives implementations. Also figure what each of a section of a chapter should contain and write/solve it yourself. Then implement your own solution in place of the implementation and the explanation shown by the book. In this way you can practice how to implement what the book says. Then you can compare your solutions and what you know with what the book contains.

- From all that you have solved and thought in the book, try to determine what the final project or main application of the book could be (what sort of program or function was originally developed with the algorithms of a book, even if the book tells you what the final project is). In this way you can get more than what the book itself has to offer, you can understand the programming style of the author (the more authors read the more programming styles understood), and in general start doing useful things with any language (the more platforms support that language, or the more of them you can port it or run the programs written in it, the better it is in the immediate term).

- You can always try to translate a program written in a language into any other. Visual Basic is excellent for real small beginners. But currently HTML5 and Low Level JavaScript is much more extended and easier (although you wouldn't be able to write native programs with it unless you implement the WinAPI and other APIs in JavaScript and then translate the JavaScript manually into other programming language). HTML/JavaScript is really outstanding for sketching the most complex common algorithms of all kinds you could ever imagine (file formats for executables, graphics, PC and game emulators, file compressors, keystroke recorders, text editors....).

- You should truly find your your favorite language for practical reasons that really help you progress. For example my favorite language is x86 Assembly with Intel/NASM/YASM syntax. I like to make it fully portable across 16/32/64 bits. It's by far the highest-level assembly language available although the language itself needs a little bit of work to be as portable as C. It's also my favorite because I can translate C and C++ code manually into it and abbreviate/debug it with a fully manual process (and secondarily with a language of my own called RealC).

SeanMc wrote:I found a site here:

http://www.vbtutor.net

I downloaded VB2012 (old version, I know) and I need your opinion at what point I should stop reading the tutorials and either practice with it or move onto something else, like C++.

If I were you, I would start with Java as it's much more complex and "C++ -like" than Visual Basic. It has a much bigger library, with OpenGL java interfaces and classes (much like c++'s).

Regardless of the language, you need to follow the tutorials until you feel confortable to write anything in said language. After finishing the tutorials, try and write something more complex and actually useful in the real world. Only then can you move to harder and harder languages.

Okay well I was going to move to Java and C++ after I got VB basics down. Is that fair?

SeanMc wrote:Okay well I was going to move to Java and C++ after I got VB basics down. Is that fair?

Java is an excellent language but I wouldn't use it for OSDev.

SeanMc wrote:Okay well I was going to move to Java and C++ after I got VB basics down. Is that fair?

I guess so. Bear in mind that Java and C++ are actually quite different languages. I'd recommend learning Visual Basic with the .NET API, then transitioning to C# which gives you the same .NET API as Visual Basic but a somewhat more powerful language. C# is also very similar to Java, so once you're familiar with C# you should be able to learn Java quite easily (although you won't have the .NET API available any more, so you might want to look into alternative GUI libraries such as Swing ( :-O ), SDL, or LWJGL (openGL binding) for Java). If you want to learn C++, start with C and a simple GUI library such as GTK (the raw Windows API in C is a pain to work with).

zenzizenzicube wrote:

SeanMc wrote:Okay well I was going to move to Java and C++ after I got VB basics down. Is that fair?

Java is an excellent language but I wouldn't use it for OSDev.

I don't think he's looking specifically for an OSdev language.

SeanMc anyways do not know programming but he registered there . Very interesting.

Lukens, plenty of people here don't know 'programming' as well as they think they do.

SeanMc, if you like visual basic or any other language you should use it. Don't pay too much attention to other people's opinions.

+1

Visual Basic is very different from traditional Basics and is a good learning language; and Visual Studio is an excellent environment to learn programming in. Perhaps not so good if your eventual aim is OS development; but it will give you a good basis to later learn other languages.

iansjack wrote:+1

Visual Basic is very different from traditional Basics and is a good learning language; and Visual Studio is an excellent environment to learn programming in. Perhaps not so good if your eventual aim is OS development; but it will give you a good basis to later learn other languages.

What are you talking about as in "not a good language if your eventual aim is OS development"? I would love to develop an OS eventually. But I'm weird like that.

Visual Basic compiles to an intermediate language called MSIL, rather than producing native machine instructions. I'm not saying that it would be impossible to program an operating system using Visual Basic (I'm sure you can use any language if you are clever enough), but it would be considerably more involved than using a language designed for the job, such as C. In this respect it is similar to C#, which is an excellent language but not a good beginner's choice for OS development.

MS Intermediate Level code, I just had to Google that.

So I should focus more on a different language that produces native machine instructions, right?

But I just have an itch for OSdev for some reason. I know I'm not that experienced as you guys.

Just code in the language you like first. Then, once you feel ready, switch to something like C and eventually start doing OS development.

Still, I can say that I learned some basic knowledge about how computers work, like the boot process, for example.

There's nothing wrong with VB.NET. It has a bad reputation thanks to VB6, but that was for all intents and purposes an entirely different language. VB.NET may as well be C# with different syntax and fewer features.

You might wanna wait 10 years or so before you start an OS though.