Scripting

[nemesis567]

This article will be about scripting and is not directed to AngelScript. It's also an article based on my experience so it may be wrong from your perspective. It's up to you to make that decision.

Before proceeding it's important to tell you that if you're scripting just to do something you found no one to do and find no enjoyment in it, forget about it and find something else to do. You won't get anywhere.


What most new users find hard is the start. How to really start is their main problem. So, what should be done? Under my perspective, there are options based on two main decisions:

1. If you want to become a professional and earn from it.
2. If you want to know how to script because you like it.

If you take the first decision, you probably want to start reading books, learning theory and only then get on the field. This is not the decision I'll be talking about because I only took it far ahead after taking the other decision(which I believe now that was the right thing to do).
If you take the second decision you should now try to find something to work on. Something way over your head, no baby steps, just jump to the top of the mountain. If you're well determined, you'll just move onto the next phase where you have thousands of open horizons.
For example, I started out with sa-mp, picked up a script of 20k lines and worked on it untill it had 40k lines (http://www.mediafire.com/?uvu5otn3gubkmzz ) and this was one of the best things I could have done. First of all, the thing I was scripting for interested me deeply at the time, so I kept being pushed forward. And the fact that I had to manage so many things altogether and understand other people's code was also of major importance.

If you manage to do that, if you learn a heck of a lot by doing that, the worst mistake you can make is thinking you know enough/ a lot. That's where most people fall, that's where everyone I met at that time fell, and now I understand how their skills are limited. Never quit. Keep going because THERE IS something to go to. If you don't become a looser that thinks he's superman, you've moved to the next step.
At this phase, if your interest is still elevated, I advise you to work on something more serious, by your own. (I created a sa-mp server with a gamemode made by me from scratch(25k lines)), but always work with something that's limited and that you've got to manage resources in order to get your thing to work. Keep your self challenged, or else your evolution will be a lot slower. By now you shouldn't need tutorials/documentation or any kind of copy/paste stuff anymore. You can perfectly work alone.
Now you've got a few choices. Take a degree, work harder, work by yourself. What's missing for you is the good coding practices and learning how to do things the best way, because you never actually got to learn that. There's no better thing than reading a book. Read it, understand it, solve it's exercises and when it's done go up to the next level of complexity until you reach the basis. That's the way I did so far, that's how I intend to go on doing. It's been working and I can feel I'm progressing.
I hope I've been of any help. I'll review this later since I'm out of time now.

[Cranky Old Man]

While it sounds nuts to not start with a manual, this is often a good strategy. You dive in, see how things are supposed to work, try to isolate what is making what work, and THEN read up on the details in manuals.
An extreme example:
Would you have read a C++ manual, the keyword glossary index starts at "__abstract", while if you would have opened up some C++ code, you'd see that the most common keyword is "if".