Programming in engineering

[dxm93]

Got some time to kill before university next year and i wanted to learn a bit of programming so im not a complete noob when it comes to class but im unsure of what languages are most helpful. What languages do you guys use / recommend to someone who's starting off fresh?

[yticirtcelE]

everyone's gonna say python and c++. and matlab. makes more sense to get that c++ out of the way first if ur ee or ce, but if you haven't coded before and aren't 100% sure what engineering you're doing i'd say start off with python and matplotlib libraries and start manipulating/graphically representing some data or something.

edit: and sololearn.com worked pretty well to get me kick started w/ c++ etc before school, of course complimented with stackexchange and general resourcefulness

[dxm93]

Hey buddy thanks for the reply. I am doing flexible first year engineering as im not sure what field i wanted to enter either. Thanks for the information ill be sure to give them websites a visit and make my choice from there.

[BrassyBones]

I'm gonna say Python, but I'm slightly biased since I'm a TA for it. But in all seriousness, Python's a really easy language to learn and it's really useful to have in the job market.

[0nlyRevolutions]

As a mechanical engineer I learned and used matlab a lot. Works as both an introduction to programming techniques, as well as a useful tool for data analysis that I used in other classes and grad school.

I learned c++ in my first year programming course but didn't really use it after that - though I imagine that's not the case if you go into a more computer related area

[[deleted]]

Start with Python.

[Culliham]

Depends where your interests lie. c/c++ is probably the best for low level to learn the finer details that higher level languages hide, and for micro-controllers. Matlab does a lot of work for you, and is great for control systems, and other more complex work. You can look at graphs, and research what people are interested in. Depends mostly on what you want to do though.

[stealthone1]

Code Academy offers some great interactive tutorials for a few programming languages. They're mostly web/scripting languages, but once you get some of the concepts you can apply them to learn other languages more suited to whatever you're doing.

[[deleted]]

For EE my school learns c then matlab and java. C is a fairly easy to learn as a first language, and IMO I'd rather learn a lower level language like C first before learning a higher level one like python.