I thought a thread like this may prove to be useful so I created one. Here all inquiries regarding any sort of programming can be asked and, hopefully, somebody will know the answer.

The usefulness of such thread can be doubted by some because one could learn programming all alone or join dedicated forums. However, one could also explore metal bands by himself to find the ones who share a similar sound to his favorites but we still have the recommendation central to help out. As concerning other forums, not all communities are as helpful or welcoming as this one, especially to newbs.

So, as a first request, I'd like to know what would be the best problems for a newbie in order to learn the branch & bound technique. Some code lines in the C language would also be welcomed.

Thanks

I'm guessing programming shouldn't be too hard to learn since Cronos learned it in his early 30's and has made a career of it.

I'm a CS major and I've taken at least 8 classes so far along with a few language (Python, vB, C/C++, Java) and I'm finally taking Data Structures this fall, what should I expect? Also what are some personal projects I can work on to build up my portfolio/resume? I feel like I've learned the same thing in 5 languages so far, learning how to solve word problems and dealing with arrays and classes. When does it get interesting?

It's one of those skills that's easy to get started in if you've got a bit of natural aptitude, but keeping up with whatever's relevant if you're doing it professionally can be pretty tricky because trends and ideas tend to move really fast in software. Maybe it's just because I do mobile dev but that's just an observation I've made. Probably the same in web dev too.



I think one thing you can do is sign up for Github, think of a simple project that interests you (for example, a simple album tracker that uses a database or something) that you can complete in a couple of weeks in your spare time and just smash it out. It's more interesting than just learning syntax or what an red-black tree is, at the very least. Host it on there in a private or public repo. It doesn't have to be anything amazing or groundbreaking, just something that shows a bit of engineering skill and your ability to see something through to completion. And sometimes you can come up with some pretty cool stuff if you aim to do something small. For example, I wrote an Android Wear watchface in about six hours one weekend simply because I have an old LG smartwatch and while it doesn't really get any attention in the play store it was fun to make and my friends liked it.

Another thing (mostly for Fortran/C/C++ coders) is implementing machine learning algorithms described in the literature, possibly with interfaces for Python/R/Matlab.

I have some experience with R and I perceive it's a good way of getting some web presence and even some citations.

Mostly CS types here it seems, but if anyone is curious about the trendiest, most cutting-edge (read: broken and constantly changing) JavaScript technologies, I'm a web and mobile developer, and I write full-stack, though at work I'm mostly occupied with writing frontend code. With frameworks like Angular 2, it's typical that the application itself is almost completely written in that department, and the backend can be a rather dumb API that simply sends and receives JSON.
Definitely. Especially in JavaScript, everything changes constantly. It's easy to burn out when you need to re-learn everything bi-annually, beta means alpha, and especially in the Node.js world, everything can just suddenly break without warning.

Haha, yeah, I can empathize. At my work we seem to like to try new architectures lifted from whatever's recent in web development and tweak it to work with native codebases -- which can be pretty tough, considering the obvious differences in the typing systems between, say, Java and JS. It's a lot more interesting than writing it all MVP though and the ones which keep track of the entire app state (which often seem to be the mindfucky ones) are especially fantastic for Android because saving and loading activity state is such a shitty mess.

It still doesn't make JS's typing system anywhere near equivalent to Java's, but I have to say TypeScript is a wonderful tool for JS development. Refactoring bigger projects is no longer the immensely time-consuming nightmare that it could be with pure JS, because you get compiler errors.