How does somebody go about designing a program

Hi,

Simply search for tutorials or books on making "Hello World", cross-word puzzles, Tic-Tac-Toe (no AI version), simple data base (might be useful later in game development), letter display application, and others. It is highly recommended to start with console program type games first, then make 2D graphical games after you have made several console programs.

I recommend a more learner friendly language such as C#, Python, or other like an interpreted language. The C# and Python have garbage collecting (auto memory management) built in them, so they are among those at the top for beginners - added to the fact that they are very well supported and have huge communities to help you.

Research the previous few weeks of pages in this beginner forum and you will have more than enough information to get started.


Clinton

I am at a dead end so i have decided to start designing basic programs(as in function names etc.).

That level of detail is often too detailed.

Do you know how meticulous i should be in my design,
[/quote]

Depends on who is doing the implementation, and how precise your implementation needs to be. Where/how can it vary from the design and not be troublesome to the program? Is some junior programmer doing the implementation? Do they speak your language?

The audience matters quite a bit. In general though, your design should be sufficient for someone to implement that design. Method names tend not to matter, but their interaction can. Even down to the method level tends to be too much detail for non-trivial programs.


And to be honest, big up-front design is generally not a good idea. Once you get into writing code, you find things are forgotten, or don't work like you expected or requirements change. Have a basic skeleton designed up front and work off of that iteratively.

As for sites: these forums tend to have a fair bit of design discussion. programmers.stackexchange tends to have a bit. Almost every programming site will have some. Why don't you think your google results are useful?

There was a pdf, however, my phone is all i have as my laptop has malware and is being fixed. And from what i judged it isn't talking about what i would like to know, it is far to long for that

One good way to outline a program, to determine the basic functions you might need, is to use a hierarchy chart. I can elaborate more if you'd like, but it basically has 4 Main points to the top tiers of the chart. You have the name of the program, basically what your goal is and what you want to output, then you break it into three categories;

Set up, run time, and finish. Under those three tiers, you branch out and consider what you would need, in it's most basic form, under each tier. Such as if you were to make a simple program run and execute "Hello world", you'd have the three main points branched under the "MAIN" function (using C jargon, forgive me if your forte is another language). The first step, you'd just want the simple print function to output the text "Hello world!", then you'd do your basic clean up stuff.

The main printing step would be under the first tier, and the finishing up "return" statement would be under the "finish" tier.

The main reason you'd use something like this is to neatly visualize the basics of how you want your program to function. It's extremely useful in larger projects so you can outline how you want each program to work. From there, you'd usually make a program skeleton then fill out the "meat and potatoes" of the rest of the program once you've decided which parts of the program you'd want to turn into functions, structures, classes, objects, etc, and what else would be just straight up code.

I'll try and add an example of what I mean in another post tomorrow if you would like one. As is, I'm pretty tired and I need to get up early tomorrow and figure out what's wrong with my eye... hopefully nothing bad. I need these eyes to be able to see my code. >;[

I would quite like you to do that, however i get your idea