Alittle help

[EmilyStrange]

@OP: It doesn't matter what you start with, just start. You cannot go wrong, merely make a few mistakes. What tools you use at this time, are irrelevant, because you don't necessarily possess the skill to determine what is good or bad. Asking someone "which is the best" should be tempered with knowledge of the person giving the answer.

I want to play piano, so which is the best piano to buy? Ask a concert pianist and he will tell you the "best" instrument is a $150,000+ concert grand. Ask someone else and they will tell you a $200 Casio will do just fine.

Until you train yourself to know what is good and what is bad, "best" is not really relevant. You'll make mistakes, so it is irrelevant what language you make those mistakes in. The important thing is to be willing to just jump in with both feet and start doing, rather than figuring out what the "best" is and worrying about making a mistake that you won't be able to avoid making anyway.

My advice is, pick something that looks reasonably easy to understand, whether that is BASIC, C#, AutoIt, Hotkeynet, or pure assembly language. If you have absolutely zero experience with programming, try one of the very simple linear scripting languages at first, such as autohotkey. It won't let you hack around inside the Warcraft memory space, but it will get you familiar with concepts, i.e. functions, loops, conditionals, that you need to fully understand and will continue to use for the rest of your programming career.

[burton992]

Thanks emily thats some really good advice

[amadmonk]

Indeed, except that I never much bought into language-religion. Use whatever tool, style, and coding idiom is right for the job. Sometimes that means a language hosted in a VM injected into a native process

Oh, btw, I would NEVER recommend that a noobie start with C++. C++ is powerful strong mojo, and it's very important to understand how the "magic" happens (memory management, hardware interface, and so on), but for that I'd honestly learn assembly over C++. C++ is good for writing system tools, and of course for reversing (since the app we're RE'ing is WRITTEN in C++ after all).

I wanted to use Lua for a while, but the lack of some really basic language constructs started to get annoying, plus having to roll my own libraries for basically EVERYTHING...

I think that Lua is actually a better designed language than Python (in much the same way that C# is a better designed language than Java, for much the same reason -- what a difference a few years of hindsight make!), but Python is superior to Lua for the same reasons that Java ends up often beating C# -- better library support (ok, that's not entirely true for Java/C# any more, but it's definitely the case for Lua/Python).

[Mr.Zunz]

I picked C# at start, I also tried to start with C++ but i found it a bit hard to understand, and C# is pretty simple to start with, you can toy much easily around at beginners stage then C++ imo.

[burton992]

A guy from my college has just lent me the book Head First C# and i must say its amazing after reading the first chapter and following it through with Visual 2008 Express, i think im going to start with C# the book is so easy to read and easy to look at, it actually makes me feel like theres somebody there teaching me lol.