Just wondering how most people here got started in Electronics/Programming.

It is very apparent from some recent posts that some newbies seem keen to use PICs for all manner of tasks but dont seem to have a basic grasp of either electronics or writing programs.

We have seen large chunks of code posted that have just been copied from somewhere else on the internet and there seems to be an assumption that doing that will magically alter the code so that is will work in the new application.

In my case, my interest in Electronics predates my interest in any form of programming by at least 10 years as there wasnt anything that required programming when I started !!!

I used to buy loads of electronics magazines every month....

Everyday Electronics
Practical Electronics
Electronics Today International
(when they used to be 3 separate publications!)
Electronics and Music Maker
Electronics (The Maplin Magazine)
Elektor

.... yet in over 30 years and hundreds of magazines I dont think I have built more than 2 projects as published and even they were subsequently "enhanced". Instead I used the articles as a basis for what I needed and learnt how to adapt the circuit to achieve what I wanted.

My first venture into programming was BBC Basic....

10 For x = 1 to 10
20 Print x
30 Next x

...and then gradually working through the commands in the user manual. Although I did a small amount of PIC programming in Assembler I much prefer the ease with which tasks can be achieved in PicBasicPro.

Again I learnt VB, ASP, PHP, Javascript, PBP by first looking at examples and tweaking them slightly to achieve different things before moving on to writing code from scratch.

I guess that many of the regular problem solvers on the forum have probably followed a similar course for the development of their skills but wonder why newcomers seem reluctant to try things for themselves.

As far as I am aware, no one has yet posted asking for code to control a Nuclear Reactor so there is very little to lose from experimentation. Its a racing certainty that the code will crash many times in the beginning but that is how you learn what works and what doesnt.

Realistically the worst that could potentially happen is that the magic smoke could escape from some components but then most of use have done that many times already.

So, how did everyone else get started ?????