

Ask HN: where to ask trivial programming questions - rhr

Greeting<p>I am trying to learn programming on my own but find myself getting stuck a lot. For example, I just wrote the simple maxLine program from K&#38;R as an exercise, the compiler, gcc, gives me the following error when I define a symbolic constant MAXLINE=1000 in the code, but happily compiles the code when I use int 1000 directly:<p>maxLine.c:21: error: expected expression before ‘=’ token<p>so my question is, is there a good website/mail group where I can get help on these kind of issues, something very trivial to experts but could take me hours to figure it out.<p>thanks
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corey
<http://www.stackoverflow.com>

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joeld42
I find IRC is great for general questions like these. people don't mind
helping newbies and since it's so ephemeral you don't feel bad asking lots of
beginner questions.

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weaksauce
Stackoverflow is a great resource and I would definitely use that for tougher
questions as opposed to basic syntax errors. IRC is better suited to this type
of question.

Before even using IRC I would google it. Google will get you on the right
track most times if you just google the compiler error. They usually only come
up when you mess up in a particular way so you should be able to intuit what's
going on. Though on this particular error it just means that you messed up on
the syntax of the define statement. (hint no equals... #define MAXLINE 100)
The third or fourth result is someone with the exact same problem.

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CyberFonic
You will find a good introductory book on programming a great deal of help.
Try to pick one that has examples of compile commands and makefiles.

Another alternative is to take an OSS project and read, make changes.
Typically all the makefiles, etc are correctly setup. There are some excellent
videos on-line as well.

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gtani
look for a mentoring or tutor list for your language

<http://rubymentor.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl>

<http://railsbridge.org/>

<http://www.railsmentors.org/>

and python

<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/tutor/>

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RiderOfGiraffes
I didn't check the others, but that last one is really advanced:

    
    
        Archive        View by:                    Downloadable version 
       January 2027: [Thread|Subject|Author|Date] [Gzip'd Text 597 bytes ]
    

I just _so_ like the idea of an archive from 2027 ...

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MaysonL
The January 1980 thread was amazingly prescient...

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rhr
Thanks for the help, everyone!

