I haven't done any programming in my life im going to Full Sail for Game Development in five months. I was hoping for some advice to give me a jump start on my education at full sail and make the transition a little easier for me

Thank you!

Do you know what way you want to go? Programmer or Artist? Perhaps designer, but its a difficult path... you must be extraordinary gifted to succeed as designer.

If you decided to become a programmer, its very healthy to know some of art disciplines. And vice versa.
I know couple of companies in Netherlands and they prefer specialists instead of all-rounders. But it all depends what you want to do in the future.

Good luck

Programmer and if im good at it eventually designer.

For programming it is best to be familiar with a programming language and for the sake of popular languages used for gaming a C like syntax one would be best (C#, Java, Python, C++, C etc), play around and learn the language as much as you can and when you feel confident start experimenting with an engine or if you want to go lower and deeper a lower level graphics library like DirectX / OpenGL.

As for the rest, it really depends on what your end game is, programmer can be split in many many areas, ranging from logic to shading and design can cover every creative area of the game, even advertisement. It is absolutely fine if you want to cover all areas, theres nothing wrong with learning more than your 'dream' job wants you too just make sure you do enough research and find out what is needed.

The learning wont really stop (this is a great thing for both you and your brain), the main thing you need to do is find a way to motivate yourself through the books, articles and lectures, you will learn things faster and easier if you can visualise its benefits. For example say you have the cliché dream of making the next WoW killer (which I personally think is an excellent motivator), typically every time you learn something you will likely be able to see where it would be used. The only reason I say this is because theres nothing worse than trying to learn and remember something where you cant see any use of it at all in your future but then I guess this is also where money comes into play, I just never really found money to be motivating

I appreciate your response. Money doesn't really motivate me either.

But, where can I go to get the basics of programming? Like a website or anything that is really useful to somebody that knows nothing about programming or any of the languages ? xD

[quote name='Hinzlines']Like a website or anything that is really useful to somebody that knows nothing about programming or any of the languages ? xD
[/quote]

google.com

I appreciate your response. Money doesn't really motivate me either.

But, where can I go to get the basics of programming? Like a website or anything that is really useful to somebody that knows nothing about programming or any of the languages ? xD

If you decide to go with C++, check this out:
http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/

If you are going to be a student, make sure to check this out as well:
https://www.dreamspark.com/

And here are a list of some recommended books:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/388242/the-definitive-c-book-guide-and-list

Maybe someone else can chime in if you are going to go with another language. Good luck!

It depends on what language you pick, each language has different resources and different uses, since you are unfamiliar with languages I will give a rough outline of uses of some popular ones.

For web related work - http://www.w3schools.com/default.asp

This is a not a bad way to start programming and that site explains web languages enough, it wont cover everything but it will cover enough to get you started, even if you dont ever plan to make a website it could be helpful, it does give an outline of web related languages (but not in great detail).

For development it really depends on the language, theres tonnes of resources for each one of these, sadly I dont know what they all are, but for the sake of knowing what the languages are

C#, Java, Python and C/C++ are popular ones but theres many many languages. C/C++ is unmanaged and requires manual memory management which can be a pain in larger projects, C#, Java and Python are managed languages.

For game development any of the 4 languages can be used, I only did a quick search but I was able to find the following links for each of the languages which may be useful

C# - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/67ef8sbd.aspx
Java - http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/index.html
Python - http://www.python.org/doc/
C/C++ - http://www.cprogramming.com/

In terms of difficulty C/C++ is considered the 'hardest' and typically you will get work done faster with C#, Java or Python

Thats really the best I can do, any more and I will be complimenting C# and brown nosing MS, its safe to assume which language I would recommend ultimately though this really is your decision and you shouldnt pick a language based on others opinion which is why I have kept the pro C# comments to a minimum