Hello seljukturk here,
I was reading through the forums and a common phrase that keeps popping up for beginner developers is for them to learn the basics of a programming language. What I don't understand is what does it mean to learn the basics of a language. Does that mean flow control (if,while, and for statements) or does it mean classes or pointers?
Thanks in advance.
I would say basics means just the syntax, operators, conditions, how to use variables of various datatypes (plus arrays), the common statements (if, while etc) and other essential stuff (like #includes in c).
In C/C++, I would also include pointers, because they are quite important.
Classes really are not necessary, many old games were made without any OOP ;-) But you'll want to learn them anyway.
I don't really understand why are you asking, btw. :-)
It depends. The basics of programming are the very things you mentioned, general concepts like variables, program flow, modularity ( libraries, modules, whatever it happens to be ), the kind of stuff that is pretty universal to programming.
That said, it depends on how intrinsic a feature is to a language. For example, you could argue that objects aren't a basic feature of C++, but they are certainly a basic part of Java or Smalltalk applications. On the other hand, the "basics" of C++ means preprocessor, linker, etc... facets that are a complete non-factor in other languages.
So, I guess you could look at the basics of programming as the general concepts that are unviersal between languages, while the basics of a particular programming language are the manditory bits you need to be functional.
Yea Serapth, that's a better definition 
Basics is what you MUST know to be able to make any (non-trivial) program.
Hello seljukturk here,
I was reading through the forums and a common phrase that keeps popping up for beginner developers is for them to learn the basics of a programming language. What I don't understand is what does it mean to learn the basics of a language. Does that mean flow control (if,while, and for statements) or does it mean classes or pointers?
Thanks in advance.
There's no definition for this, but my best answer would be to get a good beginner book on that language. Once you've finished it and have a good grasp of the topics that were covered in most of the chapters (excluding any that were clearly marked as "advanced")... at that point you probably have a good understanding and working knowledge of the basics of that language.
If you know enough to write a linked list that stores objects and then perform a bubble sort on the list then I would say you have the basics down. Basically you would know enough to write a data structure and perform algorithms on that data structure. Your code may not be optimal or even bug free but, if you can get the job done then you know the basics.
