How do I go about this? Are there any free resources that’ll help me get started?
I see people advising to start with a small project, but you need to get some basics down right? What language? How to develop it and stuff?
My only experience is some very basic C programming classes I took during school.
Harvard CS50 on YouTube might be a good start. Teaches python and you can then pivot to another language from there.
Looks interesting, I’ll check it out!
Realistically, you should still find a project that you want to do and use that as the basis of your learning, as that will influence your language of choice,. I’d start with either python or powershell stuff to get going, as both are general purpose, multiplatform languages that can do a lot and are moderately forgiving with syntax and stuff.
Past that, find a project that interests you, break down what needs done, and learn those steps individually. It’s not as cohesive as a hand holding hello world style tutorial, but I found I learned so much better if I had a need for the knowledge instead of just learning for it’s own sake.
In my case, I picked powershell as I’m a windows admin. Since I’m a data hoarder as well, I chose a video conversion pipeline to convert all of my movies into a consistent file format. Part of the requirements are to find all files with an extension that isn’t my standard (concepts: file listing, filtering, working with objects) and then execute an external program to convert the files (concepts: command line execution, state management, error handling, looping), validate the conversion completed successfully (concepts: reading file content, filtering/regex), moving the files to a new location or replacing the file with the new one and backing up the original (concepts: file management), and log file retention and cleanup. As I developed my script, I also began learning to properly “function-ize” my code to make things more readable/usable, and eventually started moving functions into a module to better modularize my code.
A decade later and I’m currently in the middle of a couple of projects using powershell to make and call API functions to automate business services at work.
Wow, thank you for the detailed response. I do have ideas for what kind of stuff to work on, especially after your great example. Thank you again!
You’re welcome! Coding has been my passion since I was in high school, and I understand how hard it can be to wrap your head around the concepts, even with formal schooling on the topic. To the point that I’ve learned so much more on my own than I did in school just because my passion allowed me to internalize the knowledge instead of just learning it.
Best of luck on your adventure!
I remember a time in my life, back when I was trying to learn C. Every time I saw a problem my brain directly started breaking it down in to steps. How to solve this consistently, think about edge cases, etc.
I want to get that back!
One thing that has not been mentioned that will make a big difference: join an online community.
When you get stuck or you’re confused and need to ask a question, you need to have a place you can reliably go to for that. You will also be able to see others go through their learning journey which will encourage you to keep going.
Someone mentioned The Odin Project already, but they have a very big and wholesome community.
My specialty is web development, but the concepts of programming is pretty universal. Feel free to DM me personally if you want some help.
I know you’ve heard it, but seriously, the biggedst hurdle to learning programming is having a solution looking for a problem. You can learn all kinds of stuff in the abstract, but your brain will either handwave over it or bounce off, if it can’t contextualise the knowledge into a problem-solving tool.
A source of small but genuine needs is the scarcest resource.
I know the world has moved on to big cosy high-level languages that let you think semantically about everything but honestly I’m still a big fan of starting with C; it is something of an austere discipline, but it gives you a boots-on-the-ground view of the problems you’re working with, and I think that really helps shape your understanding of what you’re dealing with.
(you could do a fair bit worse than the game ‘human resource machine’ for a slightly gentler introduction, then pick up some exercises in C, then move to python or similar - it will let you appreciate the cosy high-level stuff, and have a better feel for why you’re doing stuff)
My only real exposure to coding is C in Turbo C++ it was not a nice surprise when I later looked at other IDEs and was not sure where to begin. Maybe I’ll just get started with Turbo again lol.
aw hell yeah, that ruled back in the day.
Might be challenging to get it running in a modern environment, but I admire your taste in the classics :)
I always recommend https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ as it helps teach you python basics, as well as learning some coding fundamentals. Its free at the website, while offering a book version you can purchase. I have been coding in python professionally for 5 years, but I started with these tutorials (after doing a non-python coding bootcamp that focused on full stack web development)
I’ve been going through The Odin Project for full stack web development. It’s been great and is completely free.
I would advise against using Chat GPT or any other LLM; they “hallucinate” and can give you wrong information.
Imo, the main problem is that it does the job for you and you don’t learn anything. It’s great at explaining concepts though.
Along the same lines, I would suggest to never copy/paste code. Physically writing it helps your brain remember.
Yea, just copy/pasting code without already understanding it is a bad move.
If you deliberately drive GPT into a certain direction with the prompts about a specific topic and the model has been trained on the subject matter, its accuracy will be higher. If you ask GPT about a less popular language that it has little or no training on, its answer will likely be garbage.
Step 1 is determining what kinds of projects you want to make and selecting a language and/or libraries that will help you do that. Eg. if you want to code for the web, there’s JS. Then you can follow tutorials, and/or jump into making small projects.
Yeah, although some languages can be used for practically anything, including JS. Some people program microchips with it. Lol
I am a JS apologist
Not sure why nobody mentioned it, but use GPT or whatever you like to create code for you and explain everything. It is like talking to someone with some experience. Not everything is perfectly correct etc. if you get into more complicated stuff but you will certainly learn a lot and fast. The learning curve got a lot flatter with these tools.
Code combat
Like others have said it depends on the field you want to code for and language choice. The field might inform your language choice.
I’d highly recommend python as your first if you’re just looking to get stuck in. It’ll teach good fundamentals, it doesn’t have a steep learning curve and it has a very wide set of applications plus loads of community support. This website is what I recommend to anyone wanting to learn python: https://futurecoder.io/
Good luck!
Learning a programming language , is pretty simple (didnt say it was easy)…its memorization. Maybe less so now with the advent of things like Copilot/AI assistants.
Understanding what you’re trying to accomplish is possibly the harder part. I would rephrase your statement: “I want to learn how to build an application”. For this you can butter toast…with instructions.
Pretend there are two people, one is the instructor and one is the toaster/butterer. There is a wall between them so one cant see what the other is doing and the end result is buttered toast. There are a couple resources; bread, butter, knife, toaster, plate.
1st attempt the instructor says: Pick up bread, put it in toaster, take out bread and put on butter. Result: Untoasted bread, butter on hands
2nd attempt the instructor says: Pick up bread, put in toaster, push switch down to toast, take out bread and use knife to put on butter. Result: Loaf of untoasted (did you check if toaster is plugged in?)bread with butter on both sides sitting on the counter (remember the plate?).
See how specific you have to be about certain things? I would call this functional programming. Object oriented program takes it a bit farther in that the toaster is now classified with things like; browness level, electricity/plug state, slice/bay current occupancy, toast switch etc.
This is a great analogy! To build on these points and the analogy: I like to think of my coding in terms of inputs, outputs, and what needs to happen to the inputs to get the outputs I want: that is, inputs->how->outputs. So for this buttered toast analogy, your inputs would be:
- toaster
- electricity
- bread
- butter
- knife
- plate
- operator’s hands
The desired output: toasted bread on the plate with butter spread on one side.
The “how” is the sequence of specific instructions the instructor gives to the operator.
This approach is even more helpful as you start working on larger projects; as you think about a problem you’re trying to solve, try to break the overall input->how->output into smaller modules of input->how->output, and then you can use those modules (often called “functions” or “methods”) in the overall “how.” Let’s say you want the instructor and operator to prepare a full breakfast with bacon, eggs, and buttered toast. You’ll have some more inputs, of course (frying pan, raw bacon, shelled eggs, stove, in addition to the toast components), but since you already made a known-good
make_buttered_toastfunction, you can incorporate that function into the pipeline to go from your more comprehensive set of inputs to the full breakfast outputs, and you can make separate functions for making the bacon and making the eggs. Finally, your overall program can then call your bacon, eggs, and toast functions to result in the desired output of a full breakfast.Now here’s where breaking the problem down into smaller input->how->output chunks really comes in handy: one day, you are tweaking your breakfast-making code, and suddenly, your overall outputs have good bacon and good toast, but the eggs wind up dumped half-cooked on the stove. But since you made nice, modularized functions for toast, bacon, and eggs, you automatically know more where to start looking for the bug: the eggs function.
There’s a lot of good advice in the responses to this post! Overall, I just wanted to emphasize what I wish I had learned much earlier on in my career: the benefits of thinking in terms of inputs->how->outputs and modularizing sub-problems in the overall program’s “how” into subproblems that can be independently considered, debugged, and re-used on future projects. (A secret for you: those of us who have been coding for a while often don’t start everything from scratch–we’ll re-use some functions or classes we wrote in the past, tweaking them as necessary for new applications, but not needing to start from a blank text editor :) ) Learning to write applications in code is exploring a new way of thinking about problems and how to solve them, and personally, I find it very rewarding!
I wish you all the best on your coding journey!
There’s lots of options for starter projects, but I’d say a great place to start is making yourself a personal web page in html, css, and js. you can host it for free on github, neocities, or nekoweb, and its really cool to make something you can show off.
Even if you don’t stick with html as your primary language, the web is so ubiquitous now that you’ll want to know it eventually!
Start my picking what you want to do with programming. Then do a couple of simple challenges in any language like advent of code and such in python just to get your feet wet and solve some problems.
After that you should have the main building blocks and then you scale up into making a “thingy” sized project. I personally liked making games with progression like.
- Text adventure
- Tic tac toe
- Another text adventure but with battles and hit points.
- Tetris
Then you can start learning separation of code into modules like “This is the game and this is just how it’s shown” which applies to pretty much every application with a user interface.
After that you have enough skill to learn anything and you can go about learning a specific skill or technology that you want to work with and you’ll be at a skill level of a junior programmer.
Advancing beyond that I’d recommend reading a couple of books (crazy I know) that go over best practices and why they exist. You use those guidelines and get better at working with larger amount of code and then you get to mid level. During this time you should also basic rules of thumb on how long each thing takes to run, both algorithm complexity and how http requests are usually the bottleneck.
For senior level you’ll need to gain a lot of experience and become a library of solutions and bug knowledge while also having a good grasp of tradeoffs. You’ll need to know when to insulate yourself from change and when it’s overkill to deliver the code in a timely manner while not sacrificing tomorrow.
It’s very hard to skip any step in my opinion but reading a couple of books really helped me advance through the junior phase quickly just by knowing what solutions are out there. Books are not as valuable when you don’t have experience since it’ll stick 10x better if you encountered the problem described in the book.
To get started just pick anything and get your feet wet. Good luck!
Any books you would recommend?
Clean Code, in overly idealistic and speaks like it’s the holy truth but ideas are generally good. Same with Clean architecture. The guy talks like it’s the only way but in my experience it’s just a collection of tricks you could do but maybe shouldn’t because of time pressure. One off code with a single purpose doesn’t have to be that clean and functions almost never have to be that small.
Pragmatic programmer is also good and there are also more books on non-programming part as well. You could also ask ChatGPT since it’s really good at exactly these questions.
Still, no use reading this until you ran the gauntlet of building up basic programming skills :)
What type of idea do you have? You can “generally” use any of the popular languages, but some are better suited to rapid/beginner use for certain applications
Some linux iso management, some CAD software steps that I want to automate. My very general target is to get comfortable with trying to look up documentation, scripting and make my own code bashes for local use cases.
Interesting. One avenue of research I’ve found is to start with the target system and learn what interface they offer. Is it an API, a custom socket, etc. Then work back… you’ll have some clues to make a language selection
Check out https://roadmap.sh for a guideline on your set goal!
