Thread: Allegro in C for a newb

Hey all.

I'm a first year college student that's just finished the first semester of Physics Engineering, where I took "Introduction to Computing". It was my absolute first contact with programming ever, andI loved it, though I only learned the basics of C programming. However, when the semester ended, our teacher told us that our next contact with programming would only come six months later, on our second year, with "Techniques of Engineering Computation", and until then, we shouldn't stop programming or we'd forget most of what we had learned.

Needless to say, I don't want that to happen. I made a few other programs in between, but about two weeks ago, in the discussion of the final work for ItC, my teacher told me that if I wanted a real challenge and wasn't afraid of learning a new tool, I should try programming "the Game of Life" in C using Allegro to show the results. Well, I started working on the code already, using my trusty DevC++, and the farthest I went is to showing the results in real time as 0 and 1 matrixes.

(( The Game of Life is a cellular automaton, a mathematical structure that iterates the appearance of a board of black and white cells based on the status of each cell's neighboring cells - it's actually quite interesting, if you have an interest in mathematics you should check it out at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Life.html ))

Then I moved on trying to work with Allegro but, well, I can't. I haven't mastered any advanced concepts or anything. I *think* I managed to install it (though I did get 200 lines of warnings in the command window when I tried the compiling part of the Allegro instalation), but I can't seem to find my direction amidst all the information. I only need to make a board of black and white cells change with time based on read information from matrixes given by the program. Yet on ALL the tutorials I've read over the last two days, they start teaching how to design games and such... Way too complicated things I didn't understand.

So I come to ask you... Do you know any tutorial than can guide one with as little knowledge as me of C programming (and any form of programming, actually), through the steps to install and learn Allegro? One that isn't too advanced or doesn't require any advanced knowledge of C?

Thank you very much for any help you can provide.
Oh, and sorry if this isn't the right place to post this message, it just appeared to fit in here better than anwhere else.

Yeah, those were ones of the first I ran into, but they're either too specific or too... French.

And Allegro comes very very well documented. I mean, it has lots of documents, even if I can't make sense of them (they require that you have knowledge of graphical thingies before). As for the sample programs, they are examples of games, which is far too much than what I want to do, and I can't compile them anyway (I get really, really odd compiler warnings when I try to).

I was so annoyed at this earlier today I've actually called a friend and had him arrange so I can talk to a Programming Engineer that designs games tomorrow. Hopefully he can shed some light on my ignorance.