Early 80's: TRS-80 / Apple / C64 BASIC, Z-80, and 6502 assembly-language via books and the wealth of magazines available.
Mid 80's: Turbo Pascal via a local CP/M community and a couple of books. I did take an introductory Pascal class.
Mid/late 80's: C, 80x86 assembly-language, and AWK from books and magazines and by necessity at my job.
90's: C++, SQL, Perl, Java, JavaScript HTML, and many other "learned as needed" languages in the profession. I used Delphi, C, Perl, and TCL for various side-projects.
I work primarily in Java, JavaScript, HTML. As a hobby, I like to tinker with Lua, Clojure, Erlang, and Go. While I still buy books, I depend more on the Internet community for more timely information and for code reviews and such. Publishing code for all to see via a blog or Github is a great way to invite constructive criticism and to learn the philosphy ( and not just the syntax ) of a particular programming language discipline.
Beyond coding I picked up development strategies ... version-control, team coding strategies, testing methodologies, ...etc. initially from the job, supplemented by reading material.
2) I was 15 when I started learning basic in 1980.
3) I was 21 when I got my first full-time programming job, but it was unrelated to my self-taught skills, at the time. I had taken vocational training in IBM mainframe ( COBOL, Assembler ) technologies and worked in those for about a year-and-a-half before I moved onto a new-to-the-company MS-DOS team ( programming initially in C ).
Early 80's: TRS-80 / Apple / C64 BASIC, Z-80, and 6502 assembly-language via books and the wealth of magazines available.
Mid 80's: Turbo Pascal via a local CP/M community and a couple of books. I did take an introductory Pascal class.
Mid/late 80's: C, 80x86 assembly-language, and AWK from books and magazines and by necessity at my job.
90's: C++, SQL, Perl, Java, JavaScript HTML, and many other "learned as needed" languages in the profession. I used Delphi, C, Perl, and TCL for various side-projects.
I work primarily in Java, JavaScript, HTML. As a hobby, I like to tinker with Lua, Clojure, Erlang, and Go. While I still buy books, I depend more on the Internet community for more timely information and for code reviews and such. Publishing code for all to see via a blog or Github is a great way to invite constructive criticism and to learn the philosphy ( and not just the syntax ) of a particular programming language discipline.
Beyond coding I picked up development strategies ... version-control, team coding strategies, testing methodologies, ...etc. initially from the job, supplemented by reading material.
2) I was 15 when I started learning basic in 1980.
3) I was 21 when I got my first full-time programming job, but it was unrelated to my self-taught skills, at the time. I had taken vocational training in IBM mainframe ( COBOL, Assembler ) technologies and worked in those for about a year-and-a-half before I moved onto a new-to-the-company MS-DOS team ( programming initially in C ).