Again, thanks for all the advice and suggestions. I will still look to see what community college courses are available to me for computer programming, but will use the Hollywood Forums and helpful advice I can get from here, to begin my learning. I'll also look for YouTube videos, but don't expect to find many that are MorphOS, or Amiga specific, and fewer still that are for Hollywood. If there were tons of tutorials available, I would have used them already in the past, but again, choosing a college course is partly as a way to get me to devote the time each week, in addition to time I would spend at home. If I'm committed to attending a class each week, I believe it will motivate me to also do more coding work at home as well. I'm really good at wasting time with other distractions, or just being lazy, from time to time.

Nothing is likely to come of it anyway, like all the other times he has said he will start programming.

[ Edited by Minuous 02.09.2020 - 14:46 ]

What I like the most about all the new programming languages is the situation that occurs for those of us who want to learn to program, we don't know which one to choose, it seems like a candy store, a lot to choose from but not knowing which one and it looks spectacular. for what you can do, but once you install it, there are few that have an IDE that is easy to understand or handle, that is the greatest virtue of Windows Hollywood, a simple but easy to handle IDE.
I liked Borland's Turbo C IDE and haven't found one that simple again until I found Hollywood's.

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No need to be a dick about it though.

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https://www.nobleprog.com/lua/training/california

A Lua training course will be your best bet if you are going to focus on Hollywood.

@Templario

What you write is more academic if you want to program for amiga

You have only limited choices on amiga

if you want to program on different amiga platforms you can use hollywood or C/C++

If you f.e. only want to program on 68k you have more choices but still the best supported were Amiga-E and C

there were ports of even exotic compilers or interpreters but most miss all the needed library support

Of course there are tons of different languages out there but none is supporting anything amiga related

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I don't know what his problem is, but he appears to enjoy being a "dick" about a lot of things, and I regret ever donating a free G4 MacMini to him years ago, to supposedly help him produce new software. I don't remember seeing any announcements of him releasing any software though, but maybe I missed something. I think it's funny him saying that me learning how to program will likely lead to nothing, when he has been programming for many years, and I doubt he has produced much of anything for MorphOS either.

Maybe I won't produce anything of use to any other MorphOS user, but why fault me for trying.

I have written plenty of software for MorphOS, you can see it on Aminet or at my site: http://amigan.1emu.net/releases/

There are more options than Amiga-E and C IMO.
There is Objective-C in the latest MorphOS versions.
AmiBlitz3 works quite well also.

For beginners Hollywood might be the flattest learning curve.
The documentation is good. There is lots of documentation for Lua and it basically works on all Amiga platforms (68k even on Vampire is still quite slow).

> I don't remember seeing any announcements of him releasing any software [...].
> [...] I doubt he has produced much of anything for MorphOS either.

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=11269&forum=38&start=17

>> If you f.e. only want to program on 68k [...]
>> the best supported were Amiga-E and C

> There are more options than Amiga-E and C IMO.
> There is Objective-C in the latest MorphOS versions.

Now we only need MorphOS for 68k ;-)

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Right. I missed the 68k part.

But, FreePascal is also an option for both 68k and PPC.

OK I will jump in here as well.. Does anyone have a list of books for Hollywood? My Google-Fu is falling short and I am not finding anything useful.

Also, I am a bit fuzzy on Hollywood and LUA. What is LUA? I have a flight simulator program Eagle Dynamics Digital Combat Simulator (DCS) and I believe it uses LUA scripting pretty heavily.

Is LUA scripting and Hollywood related?

Sorry if these are silly questions but I have literally ZERO knowledge regarding either of these disciplines and like AmigaDave I am interested as well.



[ Edited by outlawal2 09.09.2020 - 13:28 ]

> What is LUA?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)

> Is LUA scripting and Hollywood related?

Link to an ancient thread, but I believe what I quoted there is still valid:

https://morph.zone/modules/newbb_plus/viewtopic.php?topic_id=7121&forum=51&start=7

More details: https://www.hollywood-mal.com/docs/html/sdk/LuaVSHollywood.html

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There are no particular books for Hollywood programming except the manual of Hollywood. plus a few web resources, one here on morphzone library (written by jPV).
Hollywood is a Lua 5.0.2 derivate. I bought myself a copy "programming in Lua" (3rd edition) by Roberto Ierusalimschy (this book is kind of the Lua equivalent to "the C++ programming language" by Bjarne Stroustrup) which is useful for advanced knowledge in Hollywood/Lua. But it's not needed.
Actually for a Hollywood starter no book except the manual + demo programs is needed. The manual is pretty good the examples sometimes a bit tight, but a very powerful and useful resource.
The only things needed are time and motivation.

[ Editiert durch Zylesea 10.09.2020 - 00:06 ]

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I don't think there are any 3rd party books, but the Hollywood manual is very comprehensive and it's available in many formats from hypertext documents to PDF if you want to read/print it as a book. It contains all you need to know and is perfectly fine for learning the language.


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Lua is a modern and lightweight scripting language, which is easily embeddable into other programs too and that's why it is used in many modern games and applications.


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BTW. besides the Hollywood relation, Lua is also used as an ARexx replacement/successor in MorphOS, so that also makes it useful to learn it. MorphOS comes with an integrated native Lua implementation/intepreter, which can also communicate with other MorphOS/AmigaOS programs via their ARexx ports.

I have written couple basic tutorials/introductions about these topics in the MorphOS Library:
Getting Started with Lua
Crash Course to Hollywood Programming

Wow thanks guys, great links Andreas
JPV I will be looking at your Crash Course here shortly and may just have to take the plunge and purchase Hollywood soon.

Thanks!

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If/When you purchase Hollywood and begin learning it, if you want to correspond with someone else who is going through the same learning process, I would be happy to have a coding pen pal (in addition to the many coders on the official Hollywood Forums).

As this thread has stated, and a few members here have pointed out, for me, it's the motivation to dedicate the time needed to learn (without constant distractions), that is the hardest part. I have coded in a proprietary scripting language before, but with each passing year of my retirement, those memories get fuzzier and more difficult to recall. I'm sure my steel trap logical mind will figure it all out again, once I am spending several hours regularly working on creating something with Hollywood.

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Just did another quick read through your excellent "Crash Course to Hollywood Programming" and wanted to thank you for creating it (again). One question about compressing the data and scripting files, using the "-compress" argument, or menu option from Cubic. Does compressing the files affect execution speed of the Hollywood program, or when executed, do all files get uncompressed when the executable is started, so that the only delay is a tiny bit for the decompression of those files, and then the program runs at the exact speed it would if it had not been compressed? I'm guessing that is how it works, but have not looked it up.

Also, is the Cubic IDE add-on for Hollywood currently up to date and running perfectly on the latest version of Hollywood? I had read some time in the (probably distant) past that there was some part of the Cubic add-on that was broken, but don't remember the details. I plan on using Cubic, which I purchased years ago, to program with Hollywood on my MorphOS systems, but I'm starting out on Windows, since I don't have room to set up my MorphOS G5 at the moment, and the battery has gone bad in my G4 PowerBook (though I could use it connected to the charger all the time).

Thanks again for your tutorials, and I'll use the Hollywood Forums for future questions, but since you mentioned your work here, I thought I would take the opportunity to thank you again here.

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The compressed executable is uncompressed to ram before it's executed, so it consumes a bit more memory, but otherwise it runs at the same speed etc. It doesn't matter that much in practise on our speedy systems with lots of memory, but I've started to compile binaries without compression nowadays... to save the couple megs of ram anyway and compressing doesn't actually hide the data that well if you know how/where to look.


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I think it's up-to-date currently, at least I haven't noticed anything missing in my use.


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One thing that has changed since I wrote the article is that Flow Studio also supports Hollywood nowadays, so you can use the native bundled software in MorphOS better now. I made a quick change to the article regarding this now. I really should try to use Flow Studio properly myself too, but I've been so busy writing my own stuff with Cubic IDE, because I know how it works and have my own routines to use it... but maybe I'd have time to get into it now when I got RNOPublisher out...


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Thanks, good to hear they're appreciated :)

The biggest problem that Hollywood has is the lack of support from a wider community, so the people who program with it seem like freaks, when the language has a pretty good potential.

FlowStudio supports Unicode which Cubic unfortunately does not. This is quite an advanatage.

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That is an advantage that will push me to using Flow Studio, instead of Cubic IDE, even though I really wanted to "get my money's worth", by using Cubic IDE. It just seems to make more sense to learn the intricacies of using Flow Studio now and moving forward, instead of needing to switch to using it some time in the future. Thanks for the info.

It's like my CAD program that I know very well, and I would not want to have to learn how a different one works. You just get used to where all the buttons & menus are, and don't want to learn it all again, if it can be avoided.

Cubic IDE is really wonderful piece of software, I didn't realize it until I started use it four years ago when I bought Hollywood for the first time. I had bought Cubic ten years ago when it was on discount, but for some reason never got around to install it earlier.

It just works rock solid, has many great features, and it supports many Amiga related languages, so it would be kind of shame if you don't test it and appreciate how good it was already a decade or more ago :) I regret that I didn't install it back then 10 years ago, because it would have been nice to write even AmigaDOS and ARexx scripts with it.

FlowStudio has some more modern features and GUI, but I still miss from Cubic at least auto-casing and quickhelp that is visible all the time, and Hollywood support could still be better in FlowStudio (compile options etc).

[ Edited by jPV 11.09.2020 - 20:25 ]

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Why?
It's just the data representation of the characters of your source code?
For you as a beginner this doesn't matter at all. Whether you write your code as US_ASCII or ISO-Latin-1. Any other editor can open it. No worries.

I also have bought Cubic IDE some years ago. It's indeed a super package.


Manfred