It'll take you about 2 weeks to a month of driving I reckon - really. My friends drove from London to switzerland, we were going to do from London to Italy and it would have worked out to about 2 days of travel plus camping. My friend rode from Oxford to Germany on his SV 750 motorbike it took him 2 days also. Though I appreciate africa is alot bigger.

All I worry about is when you get to Niger, Algeria, Morocco, the terrain becomes very dry/dusty/desert like - and there are alot of people wanting to escape from morocco - I watched a documentary on CNN once of this Nigerian who some how managed to get from Nigeria to morocco and finally made it so spain (only to end up sleeping on the sidewalks in happiness - geez) - so try to avoid hitch hikers.

Two things I'd like to know: 1. if you have a GPS device of some sort - not necessarily with an LCD display just a GPS receiver - a friend is working on this google map web based journey tracker, that way with your GPS data (say you upload the data to his website every time you get internet access at a cafe or something) even I can do that for you we can then map out your journey and how long it takes from point to point. 2. Do you have a camera phone / camcorder / webcam? People drive cross country america (though roads are much better) on a daily basis. You definitely need a range rover or some 4x4 in pretty good nick. Thats how discovery channel and so on get around.

U guys make me laugh. So only environment were u don't pay tax is conducive for business? Please there is nothing hard about doing business in the UK.
No wonder naija is still in the dark ages.

Exactly, and without tax the government have no reason to explain where all the countries money is going. When the government lives off businesses (and not resources in the ground) they will endeavour to make the economy more "start up business" friendly and make the process for start up alot quicker - which, is not the case in Nigeria.

What you need to do is come to the UK get educated, get experience and go back to Nigeria, they are many businesses as there are people in the UK already, if you can't think of what you want to do I highly doubt whatever you venture into will be of any use to the growth of the UK economy. Meanwhile have you looked at the requirements for starting a business in the UK; you need at least £200,000, you would have to hire at least two people and meet a very comprehensive criterium. The world is flattening and as a result alot of businesses are taking business processes outside the UK and there is a growing number of redundant workers.

You could consider shipping computer parts ie hardware, laptops etc. Thats assuming you have ready buyers in Nigeria.

Erm rather than encourage more exporting to Nigeria (and for depreciating the Naira), lets try to get HP, Compaq etc to come and setup a distribution channel in Nigeria. That will only happen when Nigeria becomes investor friendly and when theres a good enough labour force.

Every smart Nigerian person I know has plans for returning to Nigeria to start one business or the other, and the opposite of smart ones never plan on returning.

Javascript (JS), Java, PHP, syntax are almost exactly the same as C (they are all based on C so it follows). I thought I covered loops :/ yes they are the same in JS - for and while loops

No I haven't moved it anywhere. I'm waiting for anyone to get to the last subject - if statements and arrays. How did you get along, and what did you do with if statements, for loops and arrays.

You have to give it infosys and Nilekani. They really show that the world is flat!

Download it sweetheart and burn it to your CD ROM - http://www.knoppix.org/

No no not meee, I said give "him" its a nice linux distro. I have knoppix, but I can't send it to him because I'm miles away.

Normally clients have a "budget" the Design agency and quality of work reflects what you expect to get from them for a certain budget. Normally a number of agencies bid for a design project. Costs on the basis of "who" you are working for i.e. the client is a bit well inconsiderate.

http://qleyo.co.uk it is working :s

no its that, its DNS issues - long story. But it should be working now :/

Esona, do you have a branch in Nigeria presently? And are you more marketing research/analysis (market segmentation, marketing mix strategies and so on) or do you also cover creative advertising.

I work for an Ad Agency in London currently, however for the past 2/3 years have managed a design agency (myself and a partner) - In about a year we plan on extending our Ad Agency to Nigeria (more my decision as that was my original plan) and speculatively; collaborating/cooperating/working in tandem with a Marketing agency will be tangible.

Thanks guys, I needed this info too!

XML is not a programming language its a document structure! You can parse XML in any language. I once wrote my own parser for some embedded C however languages like PHP, Java I know come with built in XML parsers.

Sbucareer definitely said, I designed a system that receives roughly 14,400 entries per user per day (and they are forecasting a usage of around 300 users at the end of the year). These sort of databases require time and extensive maintenance - you want to avoid going from programmer/database designer to database maintainer (which is what is happening to me :s)

p.s. Sbu I'm still waiting on that e-mail with the docs from you oh and I'm now in London.

Get people at your university to write to facebook.com, join it and you have face directory of everyone - this is a joke of a response

What do you want to know?

You know I'd really like to know the answer to that question. I hope .co.ng will also be available

"The world is flat - the playing field has been levelled" Thomas Friedman. We can horizontal collaborate with anyone, anywhere. Outsourcing is taking a different turn on the way businesses operate and India and China are taking a big chunk of the outsource pie. I want Nigeria to join in. Forums fall under one of the 10 forces that flatten the earth - uploading.

Besides that, do you know how many forums I belong too. Name it, I'm probably on it, from PS2DEV to PSPDEV to C++ programming, to microchip.com, to CCS PIC C, to macusersforum, the list is endless. Of the above not one is "Nigerian" so this is the Nigerian forum I'm proud to be part of. Programmers have lives outside developing you know, we are humans too; who also like to "discuss" and "collaborate" and as Andresseen (one of Netscapes founders) put it, humans will go through all means to communicate.

I initially found this site after a google search, joined the forum and was bewildered at the volume of activity. Ever since I religiously visit, post, read and keep up with whats going on in and out of Nigeria and other posters minds/opinion. Buttressing my outsourcing notion, I also try to help other Nairaland posters with their programming.

Oh yay, thats good to know, How did you get along with conditional statements/loops and arrays

here, was not getting any responses/feedback and i'd hate to spend time on something that would be of no use to anyone,

I've also been fighting time the last couple of days. Hows everyone doing?

Because IMO most current languages are an "improved" C/C++, ANSI C amongs all current languages gives you the most basic functions to achieve anything. Most languages have additional functions to make life easier. If you can handle C/C++ and the software engineering, it should be fairly straight forward picking any other language up.

Like Java is a better cleaner C++ if you see what I mean.

PHP is C for the newbie web developer, but is also very powerful.

I hope you see the pattern. VB, ASP both microsoft (pffft). VB pretty much is a copy of java.
ASP lets not even start. At the end of the day, forget technology, think of the factors that come into software engineering and then the "right" technology will come to play.

Multi-platform or not?
Cost of development?
Cost of future maintenance?
Security?

Etc etc etc,

Netbeans Free, PHP free (Ruby on Rails rocks free too). Its like saying people who programmed in fortran should stick with it because its not easy to migrate.
Explains why I know 11 languages but focus on C/C++ mostly

Someone please give him Knoppix

Ewww, none of their sites interest me. Tacky tacky and more well tacky,

On another note, are they any ad agencies in Nigeria,

The almight RS232 issue, I'm having problems with a microcontroller to GPRS modem interface. Anyway I have a simple program (for windows) that writes to the serial port. I'll send it to you later if you want, you can tweak it to suit.

I never quite got the Rx input working as I wanted, I was trying to do some sort of multi-thread app (as you can't throw interrupts "per say" on a windows machine) to store the input in a buffer and continue writing to Tx, however the Tx output works fine. As it stands now, it writes commands entered from keyboard to the com port.

Do you "HAVE" to use a database at your work place? Can you not develop this on something else, test it, prove its working and then deploy.
If you are doing something for the benefit of an organisation, I don't see why they wouldn't give you access. Propose your program to them or something?

Qleyo, i have downloadd the devc++ on my PC. Can u give instructions on how to compile the code u gave in the first tutorial?.

gbengaijot, how did you get along with the compilers?

Who ever ends up doing this, if you MUST use a file then please use .xml

If you decide to go the database route in the end you can easy import xml files into most databases.

This seems rather straight forward :
Form takes in the quote. Perhaps with author field.

Writes it to the file in format
<quote>
    <author>name</author>
    <text>quote text</author>
</quote>

And you parse that back, into an array, perhaps 2d array.
And use simple rand() to select an array index (also include mod sizeof array so you do not go out of bounds).

Conditional Statements

So we have covered printing to the screen, and receiving input data from the keyboard. The next fundamental part of programming are conditions.

if, else if and else.

So lets say we wanted to ask the user some options. Perhaps a crude menu or some options.
We modify our program from tutorial 4

#include <stdio.h>
#include <clib.h>

int main ()
{
     puts ("Welcome to modified getch() program!\n";
     puts ("Please enter a character\n";
     puts ("Enter 1 to print Hello World \n";
     puts ("Enter 2 to print Good bye\n";

     char data;
     data = getch();

     printf("you entered %c\n",data);

     //now we run some checks

     if (data == '1')
     {
           puts("Hello World\n";
     }


     else if (data == '2')
     {
           puts("Good bye\n";
     }

     else
     {
           puts("Invalid option entered please try again\n";
     }

     return 0;
}

Code Explained

So now our program remains the same up until the if statement
The if statement will execute the expressions in the curly brackets ONLY if the condition in the brackets next to the if is TRUE
Also note when checking data, we use "==" instead of "="; the former checks i.e. is a == b ? or is b == a the latter sets i.e. a = b (a will now be
same as b).

Also notice the single quotation marks. This is because a character is entered by the user.

If the if statement fails, the program will check the else if condition, and once again if this is TRUE, the expressions in the curly brackets for else if will be executed.
We always ONE if statement, however multiple else if statements can follow an if statement.

Lastly, the else statement is the default case. This means if neither the if statement nor any of the else if statements execute the program WILL execute the block of
code in the else statement. In our case we tell the user neither option 1 nor 2 was selected, and therefore something invalid was entered.

Arrays

An array is a block of memory.

We define arrays like variables but also specify the size of the array.

Example

#include <stdio.h>

int main ()
{
     int x[5];
     //we now have 5 integer elements, and can access each element by specifying the address. In C we start from 0 - 4

     //assign some values
     x[0] = 1;
     x[1] = 5;

     //we can also perform operations on arrays as variables, simply in a block
     x[2] = x[0] + x[1];

     printf("x[2] = %d\n",x[2]); //this should print x[2] = 6

     return 0;
}



We can have arrays of chars, floats anything.
Note: an array of chars becomes a string.

Have a play with for loops and arrays. Let me know if you get stuck on anything

Qleyo, i have downloadd the devc++ on my PC

Could you please download salford plato instead? Dev c is a tad bit tricky, and I do not want to have to give instructions for two compilers, in addition I am using plato, so I'd rather if we all stuck with plato. Later on, we will look at Dev-C++ as it runs on a GCC platform (long store). Let me know if you have any problems

TUTORIAL 4 - Data from the outside world

So we now know how to "print" messages to the screen using puts(). Another function, which does the exact same thing as puts (but with alot more flexibility which we will come to later) is called printf().

puts("My name is Qleyo\n";
printf("My name is Qleyo\n";

Both print the same thing to the screen.

So now wouldn't it be nice if we could read data back? Well we can, otherwise I wouldn't have brought it up.
So introducing another function getch() in the clib.h library (a library is a header file like stdio.h)

getch() reads a character entry from your keyboard and returns this character.

So lets put getch() to the test, create a new file and save it as getch.c
hit CTRL + F5

#include <stdio.h>
#include <clib.h>

int main ()
{
puts ("Welcome to the getch() test program!\n";
puts ("Please enter a character\n";

char data;
data = getch();

printf("you entered %c",data);
return 0;
}

Code explained
Nothing here is new, we print to the screen, declare a variable called data, assign the value of data to the value returned from getch(). Aha functions returning values? yes of course, functions can return values, lets go back to our frying yam scenario, after frying the yams, we can either reports "yams fried" or report nothing at all. When a program returns nothing, we call it a void function, when a function returns an integer, we call it an int, when it returns a char its a char etc etc.

So say we wanted a sumation function that added 2+2 and returned the value, we would define it as

int sum ()
{
int result = 2 + 2;
return result;
}


Moving on, we come to the print statement

printf("you entered %c",data);

Normally we would print a string, so now we want to print variables. What happens if I say

printf("you entered data";

The program would print "you entered data", so how do we tell the program we want it to print the variable data, not the string. We replace the variable name with a "format tag", for chars we replace them with %c, for integers %d, and floats %f.

So here we are telling the compiler print "you entered data variable"

If we had 2 chars, say data1 and data2 and we wanted to print "data1 = %c and data2 = %c"
the[b] arguments[/b] that come after would be in the format

printf("you entered data1 = %c and data2 = %c",data1,data2);

if i swapped them around and entered

printf("you entered data1 = %c and data2 = %c",data2,data1);

The first %c would be data2 and the second %c in the string would be data1.

Say we had integers and floats, once again we put them in the order. So lets say we had a float realnumber and an int number
we print them like so

printf("realnumber is %f and number is %d",realnumber,number);

be careful to ensure that the format tags correspond to the variable type arguments, otherwise the compiler will return an error.

what if u teach C++ instead of C. as its modern.

Learn to walk before running,
Save file as .c (although if you save it as .cpp it will work just fine)