[Lazarus] Teaching Pascal at College

[Martin Collins]

Darn it, sounds like Graeme is describing me!

I wandered into Lazarus/Free Pascal a few years ago after enjoying 
writing VBA code in Excel. Admittedly I always found my (VBA) code 
sloppy and wrote some odd code just to make things work!

My coding is just a hobby that I enjoy, but I would like to be able to 
do it well and also somehow know that I am. Unfortunately I come from a 
marine (ships) background not from an IT one. No formal training in 
programming. I'm a lonely Linux user and an even more lonely pascal 
coder, so I only have this mailinglist to "litmus test" my "skills" 
against. Sometimes I feel like I'm being a pain but no one has yet been 
rude to me, just helpful which I appreciate ;-)

When I see a recommendation from someone on this list, I normally go for 
it. Therefore just ordered a copy of An Introduction To Methodical 
Programming, thanks Tony. I am envious of the students of Adrian De 
Armas who will receive some formal training.

I have a lot of books on pascal programming, pascal manuals (turbo 5.5), 
even Kylix & Delphi 3 tomes including Lazarus The Complete Guide that 
all threaten to break my shelves at any moment. All these books have 
been a great help to me, but out of interest what would the IT graduates 
on this mailing list recommend as the best reference publication for 
teaching a) programming concepts in general, & b) pascal programming 
specifically?

Thanks, Martin


On 13/10/16 09:20, Graeme Geldenhuys via Lazarus wrote:
>
> .............................................. We don't want another
> whole generation of Visual Basic programmers. The Visual Basic 4-6
> programs I had seen and unfortunately had to maintain were the sloppiest
> code I've ever seen - all written by "programmers" that dived straight
> into VB with no prior programming experience.
>
>
> Regards,
>    Graeme
>