Some B4A feedback on behalf of two kids

[moster67]

Erel, what a great development tool B4A is!

My kid, along with his friend, are just starting their 2nd year (out of five) of studying information technology (IT). Last year they studied good old Pascal as an introduction to programming and this year they will be focusing more on Networking than programming. However, they have been told to try to study some other programming-languages during their free time. Apparently they will study C in the 3rd year and during the 4th and 5th year they will be concentrating on C++ and Java along with web-development etc.

Since my kid always saw me in front of the PC, programming first in Basic4PPC and now lately in B4A, he asked me if he could try B4A. He had never studied BASIC before this day but yet, with B4A and Klaus' excellent beginner's guide, in 3 days he and his friend had completed 3 different apps and asking me to put them up on Android Market with AdMob-ads What regards Klaus' beginners guide, they saved the text in the PDF-file as a text-file and then used Google Translation to translate it into Italian (their English is at basic school-level so they don't understand everything). Only this shows how commited they were!

I must say I remained really impressed. I have never tried Pascal, which they learned as an introduction-language to programming last year in school, but apparently it was enough for them to get the basic and understand BASIC. They also liked the idea of a RAD (putting buttons on a screen etc) which I guess they never used in school with Pascal.

So Erel, you have done an outstanding product even letting novice-programmers approach the world of Android without the need of knowledge of a more complex language such as Java.

Now two questions:

1) To Erel: is it possible that students can get a discount when bying B4A?
2) To all of you experienced programmer: Is there any particular reason according to you that they should be studying C at school. I thought C was more or less replaced by C++? Maybe they want to introduce the kids to XCode-programming (and Objective C)?

Sorry for my ranting but I just wanted to let you know how great B4A is.

[agraham]

Both Objective-C and C++ are supersets of C and so C is quite a good place to start and will also help if they move on to either Java or C#.

[Erel]

Thank you for this great feedback

1) To Erel: is it possible that students can get a discount when bying B4A?

Students receive 50% discount for the enterprise version.
They should send an email to support@basic4ppc.com and they will receive an email with the discount (it is also mentioned in the purchase page).

[moster67]

Thanks for this info.

But is C still in use today? Is there any scenario where C is better/more suitable to use than perhaps C++? I am asking since my kid said he wanted to start looking into C++. If he decides for C++, will this knowledge still be useful and make him familiar with the language of C when he starts programming in C at school (in this case C being a reduced version of C++ but still they should have a lot in common)?

Originally Posted by agraham

Both Objective-C and C++ are supersets of C and so C is quite a good place to start and will also help if they move on to either Java or C#.

[Kamac]

C++ is just extended version of C which means that if he've learned C++, he already (almost probably) knows C.

But yes, learning C++ will be very big attidute when learning C later

[klaus]

Hi moster67,
I am glad that the Beginner's Guide was useful, even in Google italian.

Best regards.