I've learned that a great way to reconnect with my old mediocre programming skills is games. Ok the results might not be very useful but it is easier to create scenarios to practice on when programming games than some random application... or at least to me it is.
For example when making a game you can include a car, then you can model it like a "real" car with different classes (and not just "Car") and use it as a thought experiment.
When practicing I'm trying to setup the whole structure as real as possible (real in terms of how you would do an embedded project, this means using as CM system like CVS or Subversion (even though lately I've discovered Git and other distributed CM systems and are interested to learn the difference). It also means that I try to use different modeling tools to practice code generation and the impact of different modeling styles (for this I've tried e.g. Enterprise Architect which I'm using a lot in my work but I've also tried e.g. Papyrus on the Eclipse platform).
Besides being a great way to breed some life into "ye olde programming mind" I also get to practice different IDE:s and languages.
Eclipse is really an interesting platform to work with and if you have the time you should play around with it... basically you can setup everything (modeling, CM, coding, etc etc) in the same environment but since there a lot of plug-ins out there it can be difficult at first to find the gems.
When it comes to game programming for a novice I would go with (this is since I use Windows Vista on my home computer, haven't played around on Linux just yet):
- Java - Netbeans IDE, code-generation (stubs) from EA or Papyrus (easier to include ops and args)
- C++ - Visual Studio Express 2008 with the Allegro library
- C# - Visual Studio Express 2008 with the XNA library (the easiest way)
Well, back to my regeneration of Super Sprint.
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