Complete Noob - Can You Please offer some advice

I've just posted my trusty old VB6 web scraping code in the Code Snippets area. It does assume a fairly good knowledge of VB6, but it is exactly the sort of thing you'll be needing to scrape both betfair and other sites such as the R.P.

With all due respect buddie, going to VB6 probably isn't the best idea - it would be a bit like jumping into a 1972 Toyota Corolla and expecting it to keep up with a new Mondeo.

There are lots of languages to choose from but for a beginning coder I would look at either Java (you all knew I was going to say that) or C#.

You can get everything you need to start coding on either of them for free and tutorials and hints are everywhere for them.

If you want to play with Java, go to www.netbeans.org and grab the complete netbeans package, which includes the latest Java Development Kit. When you have done that, start working your way through the Java learning trail at the sun website.

On the other hand, if you want to look at C#, grab the latest Visual C# Express from Microsoft and go through the tutorials there.

Other options which exist are things like Python, Ruby and PHP. Every one of them has so many resources out there to help you learn that at times it is just silly. In addition to that, I have seen people on here using every one of those languages to write betfair bots (except ruby - strange that, Ruby on Rails was pretty well designed for the web wasn't it? Anyone?) so if you really get stuck, you can ask on here for some help.

If I had to choose three, my choices would be Java, Python and C#, in that order. But I am biased.

Incidentally birchy, have you considered doing some coding using Mono? It is pretty much the .NET environment but can work on windows as well as linux.

Alan

Well it's no secret that i'm a BIG fan of VB6. Anyone that has actually taken the time to learn it PROPERLY will know that it is extremely efficient in both production time and run time performance. It also has the largest number of source code samples - a quick look at sites like Planet Source Code confirms that there are 5 MILLION lines of VB6 code vs only 437,000 lines of Java/JavaScript. It has an excellent compiler which can produce exe's only slightly slower than C++...but it DOES require well written code and use of compiler optimizations to match C++. VB6 works on all versions of Windows, including Vista.

Now the downside: VB6 has a bad name due to the vast majority of its users writing absolutely awful code. A complete noob can pick it up and hack a program together - and that is exactly what happened - so most of its users never learned to use it properly. VB6 hasn't been updated since 1998 and Microsoft have no intentions of reviving it because it was replaced by VB.Net. Although supported by Vista, future versions of Windows will gradually phase out support for VB6 apps. So basicaly, M$ have killed off VB6, which pissed off a LOT of companies who still rely on it. That's no surprise though. When you have a major share in the PC market, forcing your customers to buy the latest products is good for the profit figures. Hence why i moved to Linux.

I'll be totally honest with you. As much as i love VB6, if i was just starting out and knew nothing at all about programming, i'd probably look at Java. There are quite a few things i hate about it, but a complete newbie would never pick up on those things until he/she started learning deeper, more native languages. The bonus of Java is that you can write your app on Windows and it will work on Linux and Mac machines as well. And not forgetting that most mobile phones use Java (the new Google will allow you to write ANY software for it - who fancies taking a pocket sized bot to a race course or live sports event?!). They even use Java in DVD recorders and other home electronics.

Alan will be proud of me for saying that.

Geez I must come across as being a real Java fanboi - I'm not, honestly! I know there are other languages out there which have massive advantages over Java (Python for one, C++ for another) but Java is a bit like my first girlfriend - even after we separate, I'll still have a soft spot for it.

Yeah I'm going to have to pick up some Python - it is just too damn useful to not know anything about it. Java on the other hand is the next thing to useless for doing system admin stuff and so on. Not only that, but from what I've seen in the Linux magazines and so on, you can do much the same stuff with python as you can using c++, which is awesome.

I saw an article last month where a guy was taking people through the creation of a text file reader, where the script read the text file, synthesised a voice and read it back to the user. All that with a GUI as well. Pretty awesome stuff.

That reminds me, I have to start integrating MySQL with my main bot. Hmm. Be nice to record all the odds as they come in.

Damn, I'm sure I said java. Birchy, did I say Java? I'm sure I did. Hmm.

Well buddie, here is my definitive answer. Do it in Java. Betfair does it in Java, so it just makes sense to do it that way.

There you go.