Programmers professionals: how did you practice all of programming languages?

did you take diploma or courses?Programmers professionals: how did you practice all of programming languages?
I graduated from university which gave me the basics, more of how to learn and what the environment is about. Being out in the business there is very little opportunity for dedicated training time so you usually





a) learn on the job


b) learn at home through your own projects


c) plead to take a quick course.





Courses only teach you the very basics. No one comes out of a course really being an expert. It is what you do following the course that matters. How you apply it at work or at home.Programmers professionals: how did you practice all of programming languages?
While you learn something about programming languages in school the only way you learn is on the job training. There is nothing like having a problem in front of you that must be solved in a short amount of time. It forces you to learn in a hurry. Applications are so widely varied in the real world that it is impossible to teach you all you need to know in school.





I am now retired but when I worked I had the opportunity to work with, and learn, 8 different languages. Some much better than others, all of them mainframe languages. I have sense learn visual basic but would be hard pressed to develop anything sophisticated.





No matter how you learn about programming doing it is the best teacher. Any training you get from what ever source only is a beginning. One thing to keep in mind...learning programming languages is very much like learning any language you are not familiar with. It takes doing it to make it yours.
The important thing is to learn programming - then learning a new language is just learning a different way of saying the same thing. If you start by leaning languages, without learning programming, learning a new language is starting from scratch.
I taught myself to program in BASIC using a game book, then went to technical school to learn all of the formal stuff. Most of my experience is in COBOL (yes, I'm a dinosaur :) ), but I know most everything from Assembler and Fortran to C and Perl. Still haven't delved into Java,C+ or .NET.
start off with some classes on the languages you want to learn. then create a program in one, and then try to code the same thing in another programming language