ID:181690
 
Besides the blue book (which is outdated anyways until the new one comes out), what are the best Books to learning coding with byond in both the C and Java parts of it? I do not want to follow tutorials and already built sourcces anymore to learn how to create different aspects of a game, I want to be able to learn how to code by flipping through a book and learning how different things work, and how I can create things without help.

Also, I need some books for coding on the Ipod Touch.

So please, list the top books you know , and thank you.
There is no "C and Java" part of BYOND, the Blue Book was the only physical book relating to BYOND ever published. Your best bet is the website.
I personally recommend "Foundations of F#", it's very useful for learning the F# part of BYOND.

In all seriousness, though, BYOND has no C or Java "parts". You can program in BYOND using solely DM, though if you need to do any particularly processor heavy tasks, you can offload onto a .dll file created with another language.
In response to Nadrew
Nadrew wrote:
There is no "C and Java" part of BYOND, the Blue Book was the only physical book relating to BYOND ever published. Your best bet is the website.

I feel like there must be more books relating to Byonds style of programming, I mean isnt Byond a version of C/C++ with a lot of build in variables and procs aswell as the dream dameon?

PS(NAndrew): Please, if you can, tell me the most similar book you know to Byond, from what I've seen in your posts you seem to be a very intelligent person.

PSS(Jeff):Thanks for the book, Jeff.

Im sure there have to be some books almost exactly alike Byond's coding in some parts, please help me out and thank you.
In response to Darkjohn66
BYOND has a language all of its own, there are no other books relating to BYOND's programming language. You can try learning C++, Java and Python if you want to become better at general programming practice which can help you get better with DM (BYOND's language).
In response to Nadrew
Ok, thank you NAndrew and Jeff. Now that is basically solved, waiting on help for Ipod Touch coding ^_^
In response to Nadrew
In what order in learing thosse languages would be most helpful, (aka which one is most important)?
In response to Darkjohn66
In response to Ryan P
In response to Darkjohn66
You can freely read the Blue Book by downloading it from the site.
Also, I wouldn't hold my breath until the unofficial 'new BB' comes up, since who knows when (and if) that will happen.
In response to Kaioken
oh, its unofficial? I see =/ then thats gona take a WHILE to come out =/
In response to Darkjohn66
I hope you didn't actually buy that book. I was being sarcastic. Either way, the only way to learn how to program in BYOND is to read articles on DM, which you already know about.
In response to Darkjohn66
Well then, I hope you have a Mac or the willingness to figure out how to get the iPhone toolchain up and running. Also, programming in objective-C is a lot more complicated than in DM.
In response to Ryan P
In addition to this, I recommend reading up on OOP (object-oriented programming), and MVC (model-view-controller). They're two highly used concepts in iPhone development; Apple went really overboard with code reusability.
Others just mentioned to you that "there aren't C and Java parts of Byond" and that there are no other books for it, but didn't really explain that to you fully, which it seems you require.

The programming language called "C" was created to help people do computer programming, and all was good. Some people decided there were more features they wanted, so they made other languages that were made in the likeness of C. Some of these include C++, C# and Java; those languages are made to work similarly to C, and indeed if you don't know any of these languages and you see code from them you can easily confuse one for the other. Software engineers began to use these other tools as well and created the tons of software that you use today.

Byond is a game-making suite created approximately a decade ago. Dan and Tom thought "Hey, it'd be cool if we made this thing that people could create games with!" and so they made Byond. They had to design the language that Byond would use, and they designed it to also be in the image of C. People came to Byond.com and started using this tool to create and play games, and all was well.

Byond is separate from C and Java and the rest. The language it uses was designed to be similar to C's language, just as Java's language was designed to be similar to C's. Just as Java does not have "a C part" so too does Byond not have "a C part."

As for the lack of other books about Byond...

Remember that Byond is just a small (comparatively) website with a small group of users. Hundreds or thousands of people develop games with Byond and thousands of people play them. Millions of people make all kinds of computer software with C and its cousins and Billions of people use that software.

Byond has mostly just Byond.com about it, and a few of its games have their own websites. C et al has hundreds of websites about it (them), websites themselves are hosted by software created by them and viewed on your computer by software also created by them, and most all software is written with them. For a specific example, if you play Team Fortress, Halo, World of Warcraft, or whatever, those were probably all made with C, their websites are probably hosted by software created with C.

As you can see, there several orders of magnitude difference between Byond and the mainstream programming languages; they're not quite the same thing. It makes sense that Byond has only 1 book.
If you just want to learn DM, there aren't many resources available other than The Blue Book and what you can find in the community and search engines to learn DM. Learning neither Java or C will help you a ton with DM until you fully understand generic programming practices. You can learn these practices with DM and don't need to learn these other languages that are loosely related.

Although I don't care enough to learn Java, I recommend these books to learn C:

C Primer Plus by Stephen Prata
Expert C Programming by Peter Van Der Linden

I'll be honest though and tell you that learning C won't help you much with DM unless you're willing to spend enough time with the language for a long time in order to learn generic programming practices, in which case you might as well have just learned DM from the blue book, practice, and the forums.
In response to Kunark
Kunark wrote:
Although I don't care enough to learn Java, I recommend these books to learn C:

If you know C++ well enough, picking up the most basic elements of Java should not take you more than a single afternoon, and learning about all the little things that make it different should not take more than a week or two of light reading. What makes it a different experienc is just that it has libraries for almost everything under the sun, and they are well done and easy to use. The Java programming experience involves half its time just looking up which object does what you want and which functions you need to use.

C Primer Plus by Stephen Prata

Is that the one with the blue cover and white font on the cover? If so, I can not stand that one. Unless they've made better editions since, that thing had sooooo many typoes that it greatly hinders progress through it. Some of the typoes are even syntactically correct but cause bad logical errors.

I'll be honest though and tell you that learning C won't help you much with DM unless you're willing to spend enough time with the language for a long time in order to learn generic programming practices, in which case you might as well have just learned DM from the blue book, practice, and the forums.

I will agree with you here, though I'll go so far as to say that anyone learning to program in any language should try and learn general programming logic as much as possible (not all tutorials are oriented such, I understand), as that helps with your first language, but then it also makes it very easy to pick up more languages after that.