Originally Posted by Kkthnx
But a good place to start would to learn from a site / book in my honest thought. You can also look at other peoples code and learn a lot from them and write it your own way.
|
Personally, I've never found books or specific tutorials useful for learning a programming language. The tutorials are always completely pointless and mind-numbingly boring, and it's a huge turn-off. I'd much rather just take someone else's existing code that does something similar to what I want to do, learn the basics from reading that, and then use the relevant API documentation to figure out how to do specific things. Other than my own code (obviously
) I would recommend looking at any of Tekkub's or Industrial's addons. While there are several other authors who spring to mind as having "nice" code, their addons are big and complex, so I can't really recommend them as examples for beginners.
If you're more of a book learner, though, or like working through tutorials, I know other people have found the
World of Warcraft Programming book helpful.
Stay far, far away from the "examples" you will find on sites like ArenaJunkies. Most of the people who post code on those sites have absolutely
no idea what they are doing, and write some of the worst code I have ever seen in any language. The examples on Wowpedia are not much better, but at least Wowpedia has accurate and useful API information.
You can find some more links to sites with API documentation etc here:
http://phanx.net/addons/resources
(Yes, I know there's a forum thread with the same links, but I don't know that URL offhand, and I don't have any advertising or other crap on my site, so I don't feel bad about linking to it. )