What to do after learning programming basics?

After going through an introductory textbook to a programming language, what is the next step in getting experience that one could put on their resume? I want to say I've worked in programming development, so maybe I could join an open source coding project, but can someone who's just read through a textbook really help that much?

I'm still reading currently but I want to know what to do once I get to the last page.

Make programs yourself.  Build experience.

go through introductory textbook on algorithms and data structures

Join an Open Source project

Don't join an open source project if your experience with programming is limited to an introductory textbook. There's too much shit code out there already.
Do some problems on your own. Project Euler or old /prog/ challenges or similar. Get a reasonable feel for a language and for programming in general.

If all you're interested in is things that translate directly to résumé bullet points, you'll never be a programmer worth the name.

>>5
Most Project Euler problems teach you a small subset of programming that won't help you with much else. Doing some old /prog/ challenges is actually a pretty good idea, there are some good ones.

And you'll also need to learn some libraries if you want to write anything useful. For example, you'll need to do some GTK+ or Qt tutorials if you want to contribute to a project that uses one.

But in general, just write a bunch of different programs. Toy interpreters and stuff like that.

Well I'm going into financial engineering so there isn't a whole lot of low level coding, mostly just solving mathematical problems cleverly. I guess project euler would be good practice for that, thanks.

9 Name: Anonymous 2011-02-04 19:19

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