Some time ago I decided I need some more hands-on experience in programming. Searched the web, found a lot of tutorials with various degrees of usability for a novice (which I still am) and created a little bash script for starting my wireless card on Debian Etch at boottime. I was thrilled when I got that to work Later I wrote another script, automating starting up a virtual machine with Qemu and giving it some more RAM then the default 256 MB. In the mean time, I purchased a book on C++ programming by Bjarne Stroustroup, translated in my native language (Dutch). I must say that it's very abstract and I haven't finished it yet (not even halfway) because of this.

Can you recommend books, online howto's, etc for a novice to start understanding how to program? I have a basic understanding on statements, variables, loops, etc as I used to read books on microcontrollers (PIC, 8051 derivatives) and their assembly languages. Not that I ever wrote a program for a microcontroller, but it did teach me some basics of how hardware works on a bit/byte level.

I'm working on Debian Etch (no M$ crap here) but I prefer learning "platform independent" programming so porting the application I have in mind to another arch or OS could be relatively simple. The program also requires some real-time detection on a regular base, so it should be fast.

If you've read this far: thanks!

It's difficult to know what to recommend, because I don't know what you've seen already, and how what you've seen already is insufficent. I might be suggesting something you've already tried (in which case, please forgive this answer), but if you haven't google this:

I found Bjarne Stroustrup's book helpful, as you did. (For some perverse reason, I always want to call him Bjarne Bootstrap.) That book has zillions of exercises. One good thing about these exercises is that they help you get your feet wet, so the concepts don't seem so abstract. So if you haven't tried the exercises, try some in the earlier chapters that might have seemed simpler to you. That should make you more ready to absorb the later chapters. I think.

Hope this helps.

Thx for your reply. That search string was exactly what I used initially and it yielded many hits of varying degrees of usability. I'll have another look at the book and try some of the exercises. I skipped those as most of the time I read the book (during brakes at work) there wasn't a suitable computer around for trying it

Stroustrup's book is very much a reference book like K&R is for C.
Maybe Accelerated C++ Practical Programming by Example
http://www.acceleratedcpp.com/

C++ Standard Library - A Tutorial and Reference
http://www.josuttis.com/libbook/

Then theres the effective series by Meyers,Stroustrup etc.
It really depends on how big your pockets are, or how good your local library is

Free online, as well as in print, and one of my preferred tutorial-oriented authors, Thinking in C++ by Bruce Eckel.
--- rod.

i would second that, especially for starting out.

Hmm. Now that I read my own posting, it looks like I should clarify. The hardcopy version is not free. I suppose that might be obvious, but the wording of my original post might have sounded to some as if the hardcopy was free. Nope, just the online version. I find the combination of searchable online version + printed hardcopy (with scribbled notes and read-anywhere capability) is the perfect resource format.
--- rod.

Check out Erlang. The language was originally invented at Ericsson for use in telephone switches. It makes a lot of things (concurrency, soft-realtime, error-recovery) very easy. It also runs on a virtual machine, so the same source code you write will work anywhere the VM runs. You can also byte-code and native compile Erlang. There are some tutorials online, plus manuals on the Erlang website, and the Pragmatic Programmers have a book coming out about it. I'm no expert, but having written my website in Erlang, I must say its a fascinating language. I hope to dig deeper into the concurrency, distribution, and error features this fall when I have my web applications class.

Thanks guys, I'll take a look at Erlang, sounds promising.

@theNbomr: I surfed to the Eckel site and already concluded that the online version is free and the book isn't.

Why hasn't anyone mentioned Java yet? I mean, if it needs to be portable...