Many bridge players are also adept in other fields, and I’ve noticed that it’s a trend for a big chunk of bridge players to be programmers, interested in programming or just keen on tech. This makes for good opportunity to dig for a few things that are programmer-specific, and that might help you to understand the mechanics of programming card games better.
Here are some great links for programmers, whether you’re looking to learn an entirely new skill, a fresh language or just want to peek into some source code containing cards.
Programming Card Games with Visual BASIC
Anyone who has picked up a programming language is bound to remember the joy of the Sams Teach Yourself [This] in 21 Days. It was one of the first programming books in C that I ever encountered and worked through – and the Visual BASIC equivalent had a few great practical examples that taught you how to make your way around the language.
This link is home to a couple of card games programmed with Visual Basic, all as an excerpt from Teach Yourself Game Programming with Visual BASIC from the Sams series.
Creating a Blackjack Game in Visual BASIC
Code Guru is a great programming community that can lead you to plenty of useful articles, columns and tutorials in every coding language you could think of – even a few very, very obscure ones. Here’s a guide for creating a very simple blackjack game using classic Visual BASIC.
Programming guides used to be rare in the days of BASIC. I don’t know if this was true for everyone,but it was certainly true where I grew up – and I had to borrow this book from the library and ask someone to photocopy and bind it. (Together with this, I made a few simple games as practice, and frankly don’t remember just how I did this today.)
BASIC Computer Games was a classic guide, and this link will give you access to the source code for a bunch of classic games and how to put them together. On this page, you’ll find the source code for Visual BASIC games like blackjack, checkers, dice, poker, tic-tac-toe and more.
Programming isn’t all about BASIC, of course. Take a right at memory lane and let’s get to some more practical programming with other languages. C# is one of the first languages most programmers get their hands on, and here’s a handy website link that’ll run you through the basics of making a card game while teaching you about essential programming concepts like PIctureBoxes.
C++ Forum – Program to Generate a Card Deck
A simple program for generating a card deck can teach you a surprising amount about code: For something simple that can be the equivalent of the good old Hello World experiment for a programmer, here’s a program to generate a card deck – described and discussed on the CPlusPlus community, with accompanying code snippets.
Android Blackjack from Edureka
There’s more to program for these days than just PC and Mac. Just so any mobile programmers don’t feel left out of the mix, here’s a guide for how to create a simple blackjack game for Android. More programming tutorials for other games (and more languages) are available at the link.
Just one more: It was impossible to write this list and leave bridge out of it, so here you go. A discussion between programmers on StackExchange surrounding the programming of a simple bridge game using Java.