Thanks for all the suggestions guys. I started messing with Java for a little bit today, I just did a few basic things but nonetheless it was a start!
Learning to Program
- Thread starter FCXoptions
- Start date
Just remember that there is nothing that you can think of doing that somebody else hasn't been done before.
Blessedly, they posted their experiences, code, libraries, etc, on the Net for you to use, abuse, or improve upon.
Hence, the projects I listed previously. You'll learn most of basics you'll need to know and understand about programming by tackling those projects. From there, you can graduate to interfacing with brokers, data sources, and other vendors.
Initiative is your responsibility, but Google is your friend.
Blessedly, they posted their experiences, code, libraries, etc, on the Net for you to use, abuse, or improve upon.
Hence, the projects I listed previously. You'll learn most of basics you'll need to know and understand about programming by tackling those projects. From there, you can graduate to interfacing with brokers, data sources, and other vendors.
Initiative is your responsibility, but Google is your friend.
Quote from blah12345678:
Just do it ...
Quit wasting time and waiting for someone to tell you what to do or hold your hand...
There is no best language...
There is no best operating system ...
There is no best book on how to learn ...
Just pick a language, pick and OS, and go with it... You can expand your horizons (different language and/or OS) later when you master the first one.
What to program? That's easy. Go find all the stocks listed on Yahoo Finance, scrape the important info (Symbol, Name, Exchange, Sales, Shares Outstanding, etc.) and put it into a file.
Second project - automatically download all the historical quotes for each symbol, and put it into a separate CSV file with the following fields: Symbolate:Open:High:Low:Close:Volume:Adj_Close.
Third project - parse each price data file, and determine the 52-week and All-Time highs and lows, adjusting for splits and dividends (hint, that's what the adj_close field is for).
Fourth project - parse the price data, and create moving averages of various lengths.
Fifth project - use PHP to feed your price data to HighStocks (highcharts.com) so you can draw pretty graphs of your data and moving averages.
Then write these five projects in another language and see which one you like better.
This will teach you most of the fundamentals of programming. You can now take this knowledge to tackle other projects.
Fantastic Advice!!!
+100
How do you know Google isn't the NSA?
After all, the NSA's buried deep in the DOD, and few outsiders know anything about the full scope of their budget or operations except the JCOS, POTUS, and a very small # of Congress....
That stuff that Snowden's disclosing... It's probably a PR ploy by the NSA - letting the world know how big and bad they are to keep everybody in line.
Much like the IRS and their front-page convictions of someone famous. 1 in 100 get audited, but that 1 pays for all our sins...
Anyways, we digress...
I second the suggestion that âblahâ made earlier. Doing those 5 tasks in any language would give you a good idea of how to learn it. There are some advantages to certain languages, but for the most part they all try and do the same thing. Python is one of the easiest to learn IMHO as well as PHP. You can do a lot in either language and if you donât need super nanosecond speed they work really well.
I want to reiterate that choice of programming language for financial markets is dependent on third party software offers, API being offered, platform on which it will be executed etc. In another words it is not about picking and choosing best language but about having job done using what is being offered.
With software anything can be done with any language but the cost and effort to interface with financial markets using something different might not be worth it. Just learn their language.
With software anything can be done with any language but the cost and effort to interface with financial markets using something different might not be worth it. Just learn their language.
Yes, this is true. But he is requesting how to start learning how to program.
Telling a newb to jumping right into learning vendor APIs and other 3rd party software is like taking someone fluent only in Farsi and telling them to translate the Koran into Korean.
He has to learn Korean first...
Baby steps...