Don't know a single thing about programming.

Hi my name is A.J. I am going to college in another year for electrical engineering and I thought it would be a good time to start using Arduino. I am pretty well off on hardware thats why I want to be an electrical/electronics engineer, because of my fascination with this type of stuff. I just have never been a programming type of person. I usually just put stuff together and built new things but now I really need to get into programming because of my more complex projects that I want to do that require a microprocessor to control. If anyone can give me any info on the structure of the programming language that would be great. For example I see so many of these signs () } \ and the are just all over the page. What exactly do they mean? Thanks for any help in advance. Also I know I need to practice a lot with this stuff but a project I am very agitated to get into is having a laser diode shine across a doorway onto a photo resistor and trigger an alarm if the resistance goes above a certain level like when the light path is broken by someone/something.

There are 1000s of online references and tutorials on C and C++, it's way too large a subject to detail here so all I can suggest is that you hit Google and look at plenty of examples. When you hit something specific you don't understand ask us here.


Rob

Ok thanks, I was doing that it seemed to work but it is a lot of information to handle all at once. What do you think the average amount of time to learn a good amount of the language is?

Find something you're really interested in building...
Start small, learn loops, pointers and arrays, you'll be a guru in no time

AJ710:
Ok thanks, I was doing that it seemed to work but it is a lot of information to handle all at once. What do you think the average amount of time to learn a good amount of the language is?

Years.

It may be worth considering take a class in the basics of structured programming.

What do you think the average amount of time to learn a good amount of the language is?

I'm thinking 20 years :slight_smile:

OK maybe not, but don't hold your breath. The good news is that you should be able to write a useful program in a no time at all really, it just won't be very well written (probably).


Rob