Tools of the trade

[Applemung]

I hope this is an appropriate place to put this up.

My current skill set enables me to design and produce hardware for most electronic applications. My educational background is just shy of an advanced diploma in Electronics engineering (I have an associate diploma) based in microwave communications. In my job I work with imaging radar technologies (SAR) and I build and test systems as well as actually use the systems actively. This background gives me a solid understanding of electronic systems and integration. Where I fall over is the software side of things.

Just as an example, I have built my own quadruped with an arduino brain. I can get it to walk with some simple functions but that is about the furthest I have gotten.
To get much further and to scale down the size of the code I need to implement inverse kinematics, basically just some maths. But for the life of me I do not know where to start and how to do this in code. So here lies the topic of my post:

Where do I begin to learn about computer programming?
I would like to know what would be good reading material to get me a bit of a head start before I resume study. Anything that has had a good influence?
I would be after something with a beginner to intermediate reader base.
Most people would have started as a hobby and as such would have come naturally to progress through school and then higher learning.
Whilst I come from an electronics background, my hobby at home was predominantly working on cars. Due to life, things have changed.
Electronics has now become my main hobby and it works great to further my knowledge and skill set in my current line of work.

I have a basic understanding of code and have little experience in java, C ++ and assembly language only for quite simple tasks that don't require anything tricky. think along the lines of a washing machine cycle. Do task - wait for task to finish - next task - finished - wait for input.

Next year I am resuming studies with the intent to finish my advanced diploma and move onto university, my aim is to be doing electronics engineering with an RF focus along with computer programming.

[zalo]

I highly recommend going to Processing.org, downloading their IDE, and checking out all the examples they have. For me, the quickest way to learn (really LEARN) is to reverse engineer well-written code, and the processing examples page is just a goldmine for that. Processing is great because it IS the arduino IDE, but just for software. Like, the arduino guys took the Processing IDE to make the interface for arduino. Master Processing and it will transfer 100%.

For instance, you mentioned you want to do some inverse kinematics: http://processing.org/examples/reach1.html
BOOM! A fantastic example with friendly source code is available right there on their website. There are more examples there for dealing with an arbitrary number of segments and more. Actually, using this source code I was able to make this: http://www.openprocessing.org/sketch/84256

Once you've mastered all the examples, you will be ready for the next step.

[Applemung]

Thank you for that zalo, I'll go through those examples.