How to start to develop EA? Books, Websites, and anything informative!

Hello!

I was wondering how the developers here started ? Did you read books or websites?
What is important to know? How long did you need to understand the programming language?
Thanks for your answers,
regards, Rainer Nachbauer

It takes for ever mate.

Think in years, not months. If you're quick it will be 3 years. Just testing a new EA you need about 6 months to run it, before you know if it stands any chance on a live account. Most you do will fail after a while, so it's test after test after test after test.....

If you're not a programmer I strongly suggest partnering with one.

Metatrader is, by far, the most popular platform for developing EA's. If you have worked extensively with any programming language before, MQL is not at all difficult to learn/master. Best way to get a feel for the language is to look at the source-code for any of the indicators and EA's that are supplied free with Metatrader. Just use the MetaEditor (found under the 'Tools' tab) to open any of those .mq4 files.

You won't be able to look at the code for most commercially marketed EA's, as those are supplied in compiled code (.ex4) that cannot be read.

Now, that was just the part about the programming language. As for developing a successful EA, see Elkart's comments.

G'Jim c):{-

For example, I went on https://docs.mql4.com/ and spent a few hours reading all that pages to get the general view of its possibilities and syntax, then looked for the most basic example of a program and then started to build my own HelloWorld EA which could submit orders, print some info on the screen and other basic stuff. Then I thought of a simple strategy and implemented it. You can do this steps in half a day, all comes natural if you have a good programming experience as well as a forex trading experience.
The challenge is to get a winning EA, and that's rather a measure of your creativity, intelligence and perseverance in testing in my opinion and not a measure of how many books you read.
but I'm only an idealistic noob which never went live so far :D

Yep, coding indicators or EA's really isn't all that difficult if you have programming experience. I have coded several indicators, never have coded an EA - but that's just adding a bit more code once you have programmed the indicators that you wish to use.

Coding Robots is an entirely different game - one that I'm not prepared to play. I have absolutely no idea of how to code for watching the Economic News calendar. Regardless of what particular indicators/strategy that I might use, I always check the news calendar (https://www.dailyfx.com/calendar/) at the beginning of each trading session.

That's the problem with many of the trade-bots that are sold - they do not (cannot?) take news announcements into consideration and an open trade can really get hammered during some news announcements. In addition, some trade-bots will even leave a trade open through the weekend - a VERY BIG NO!! in my book.

G'Jim c):{-