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Table of contents
- Importance of programming.
- Choosing a programming language that suits your needs.
- Choosing the right resources.
- Downloading an integrated development editor (IDE).
- Practicing writing codes.
- Do your own personal project.
- Searching for help.
- Never stop learning
The importance of programming
These are some words from Steve Jobs , the founder of Apple about programming. Below follows a motivation video from Steve Jobs about creating things , it actually one of my favourite video.
With almost everyone learning to program ,does that mean you should learn it too? Even if you’re not someone who is going to take a programming course in the future ,here are some reasons why you should begin your journey in Programming:
- Becoming more efficient and productive.
- Improving your problem solving skills .
- Programming improves one's thinking capacity.
Becoming more efficient and productive
Programs are great at doing tedious and repetitive tasks for us. You could write programs that can complete tasks in minutes that would require hours if done manually. For example, you could automate the process of manually entering info into excel from a text document into an excel sheet.
Improving your problem solving skills
Got an idea for an app or a website? Programming allows you to bring that idea to life.
Improving your thinking capacity.
Programming is all about using code to solve problems. It teaches us how to break a large problem into smaller subproblems and solve those problems. This is a common strategy known as divide and conquer. I hope that I have convinced you why programming is worth learning. Now on to the real stuff.
Choosing a programming language that suits your own needs
Nowadays , there a lot of programming language, so some times it confusing which programming language to choose. My advice would be to be the
programming language that is best aligned
with your goals: ie. What do you want to
achieve from learning how to program? So if
you plan to develop a mobile app you may
want to begin with Java or Kotlin for Android
and Swift for iOS, and if you want to build a
website JavaScript is suggested, to begin with. For a profession in data science, AI &
ML, Python & R are the languages to study.
If you still don't know which one to choose
then my recommendation would be to start
with Python as it is simple like English and so
easy to learn.
Each programming language is used for some purpose. So , it better to choose the best tools for certain work. The picture below summarizes use of some few programming languages.
Choosing the right resources
There are a ton of educational sites where
you can find programming tutorials. Some of good sites to learn programming for free are:
Downloading and Installing IDE
Although a lot of online courses let you write
code in a code editor directly in your
browser, you need to realize that this isn’t
how it works in the real world. Once you
graduate from your online course, you will
need to start writing your code directly into a code editor, so it’s a good idea to start
practicing doing this now.
Most programming languages have code
editors that you can download. They usually
come complete with interactive
development environments (IDEs) that will
help you build clear, error-free code.
Below are few IDE you can use for coding
- Sublime text
- Visual studio code
- Visual studio 2019
- Notepad++
- Pycharm
- PhpStorm
- Jetbrains for java
Practicing writing code
Once you have a basic working knowledge of
your chosen language, you will need to start
creating your programs. Although you might
feel that this is a long way away right now,
you will be surprised by how fast you
progress once you start learning.
Choosing a programming project.
Watching courses alone would not help you
internalize the concept. You would have to
put the concept to practice. The best way to
do that would be to come up with projects.
If you have an idea for a project or have a
problem you want to solve with coding,
that’s great!
How to choose a programming project to work on?
1.Choose something that interests you
Whether it comes to studying or coding you
must do what interests you the most. You
must enjoy the project area you choose so
that you are passionate about it and it keeps
you engage until built. If you choose
something that is not of your interest you
may end up giving up your project in the
middle as you might eventually lack interest
in it.
2.Start with something simple
Being confident about your capabilities is
good but being overconfident is not. So it is
recommended that you begin with simple
and easy projects to explore the language
more before you dive into building complex
projects.
Searching for help online
There would come a time while you develop
the projects that you would feel stuck it
could anything from getting errors, your
program crashing without any message or
even your coding executing fine but not
generating the output you desired you might
get so restless even sometimes that you
might want to give up. What do you do in
such scenarios? Don’t give up! Stay
motivated, and to help consider below the
points to continue working on your project.
1. Use Google
This is a crucial step that you must master.
Searching and surfing the error of your code
would help you correct your code within few
minutes but on the other hand, if are not
sound at this skill it would be like diving into
a whirlpool of code without a map. A tip that
I would like to share here is to put the error
generated by your compiler in double quotes (“ ”) before searching on Google. This
way Google would specifically target the
error as the same sentence and that would
give a much accurate filtered result.
2.Use stackoverflow
Websites like Stack-Overflow and Reddit top
the charts here to guide developers around
the world with their code. It is a full-fledged
community of developers from all fortes that
come up to help each other in their projects.
Posting your doubts here could even take 2-
3 weeks to get a response but it is worthy,
although you might already end up finding
the solution to your error as many people
might have come across the same error before. It is also suggested that you answer
some of the questions that you can to help
others and so this way you would also learn.
Conclusion
In a way, programming languages are like
any other language. They require regular
practice if you want to become fluent in
them, and you will forget things if you don’t
practice using them. It is, therefore essential
to make sure that you keep learning new
things every day.
Don’t fall into the habit of using the same
coding patterns and syntax for everything.
Instead, keep striving to learn new ways to
do things and to improve your method.
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