Great insight. Every time someone says, "I want to learn to code." They should have a project/task in mind and just go. The stack that Suneel lays out is a good foundation for web dev, but as he admits, he like many others invested more time than was necessary in books/documentation/tutorials. More people need to just jump in. If you get to a point that you want a feature from jQuery, look it up and implement it, but…
>Every time someone says, "I want to learn to code." They should have a project/task in mind and just go. If there was a list of software projects somewhere, ordered by difficulty, with tips on how to get started and how to extend it later, I would be very interested. I can code (somewhat), but I find that any time I have an itch to scratch, it's much easier to google it and solve it through existing software and con…
The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code
11–20 of 90 posts
Re: The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code
#12Best quote in the article: There are so many benefits to jumping right in. You’ll quickly get over any fear you may have of programming. You’ll start seeing the fruits of your labor right away.
This did it for me. I've been having this exact same thought for the past two weeks. After hitting development bottlenecks on my last project, I committed to learning to code to the point where I could hack together functional prototypes. I've been training by manual, and was just speaking with a friend about how dry it is and the fact that I'd be more fulfilled working on a project and couldn't wait for that. We hav…
Awesome! I have been trying the same sort of thing and documenting it here: http://mksht.crisnoble.com
I was inspired by: http://mroosendaal.prosite.com/628/612/work/msced and http://designitcodeit.com/
Plus Mig Reyes's quote "Just make a bunch of shit" or the more eloquent way that Ira Glass put it "the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions."
Re: The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Every time someone says, "I want to learn to code." They should have a project/task in mind and just go. If there was a list of software projects somewhere, ordered by difficulty, with tips on how to get started and how to extend it later, I would be very interested. I can code (somewhat), but I find that any time I have an itch to scratch, it's much easier to google it and solve it through existing software and con…
http://mindprod.com/project/projects.html
That's a nice list to help people when brainstorming. I wasn't necessarily implying that the project had to be something new or different, or even specific to the user. A lot of people learn rails or django by making some microblogging twitter clone. On a recent relevant topic, sometimes the best ideas come from emulation and slight modification, so maybe you just challenge yourself to replicate a site or web app you use.
Re: The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code
#14Congrats on learning to code but the biggest mistakes new hackers are making is diving right into learning a specific lang. Learning programming fundamentals is a better way to go. That way, you can jump from lang to lang. Starting is hard so congrats again.
I disagree. You didn't learn to talk by studying rhetoric. You imitated sounds and words that people made around you. Then you started being able to express your own ideas. Then, maybe, you learned how to say things well.
It's the same with computers. While some people may enjoy learning deductively about abstractions like algorithms and paradigms, studies have shown that most people learn inductively, by having something they want to do and figuring out what to do.
Re: The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code
#15Congrats on learning to code but the biggest mistakes new hackers are making is diving right into learning a specific lang. Learning programming fundamentals is a better way to go. That way, you can jump from lang to lang. Starting is hard so congrats again.
I agree and disagree...
Learning the fundamentals is important, but one must put the theories in to practice by learning a language, writing some code, making mistakes, correcting them, and learning how the fundamentals work in practice.
Re: The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code
#16This pretty much applies for any endeavor ; not just learning to code. Thanks for the post.
2 Biggest mistakes when learning to [TASK X]
Mistake #1: I spent too much time learning things that I didn’t actually need.
Mistake #2: I didn’t start [TASK X] right away.
Re: The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code
#17Congrats on learning to code but the biggest mistakes new hackers are making is diving right into learning a specific lang. Learning programming fundamentals is a better way to go. That way, you can jump from lang to lang. Starting is hard so congrats again.
I disagree (at least that this is universal). If you start with just fundamentals but no specific language, you can't whip up anything to play with. The amount I was able to learn easily without doing anything was quite low, so I'd say start with a language with a responsive interactive shell so that you can quickly see what things do for yourself, and (crucially) see what happens when you make small changes to whatever examples you might be looking at.
But there's a bit of this I agree with: don't get focused on just one language. Once you can get basic stuff done in one language, it's worth learning how to do stuff in a different language. For me, the second language was almost as hard as the first, but after that it got a lot easier.
(Which is not to say that I don't think fundamentals are important: I'd suggest eventually hitting the core algorithms, data structures, computer architecture stuff—even if it doesn't seem immediately relevant—as well as playing around with more out-there stuff (Prolog was always a favorite of mine). But I don't think all that's going to be interesting at first to someone who's just getting started out of a practical, "I want to build something", not a "I want to learn all of this!", motivation.)
Re: The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code
#18Congrats on learning to code but the biggest mistakes new hackers are making is diving right into learning a specific lang. Learning programming fundamentals is a better way to go. That way, you can jump from lang to lang. Starting is hard so congrats again.
I would talk a more organic approach. Jump right in and when you come upon some bigger subject matter (sorting algorithms for instance), take a break and go study the subject a bit..
Re: The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code
#19Congrats on learning to code but the biggest mistakes new hackers are making is diving right into learning a specific lang. Learning programming fundamentals is a better way to go. That way, you can jump from lang to lang. Starting is hard so congrats again.
I agree and disagree... Learning the fundamentals is important, but one must put the theories in to practice by learning a language, writing some code, making mistakes, correcting them, and learning how the fundamentals work in practice.
thats why cs courses has projects, to test the theories in to practice, the good thing about fundamentals is that it teaches you that the language its not an end for it self instead its just a tool to express yourself
Re: The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
This did it for me. I've been having this exact same thought for the past two weeks. After hitting development bottlenecks on my last project, I committed to learning to code to the point where I could hack together functional prototypes. I've been training by manual, and was just speaking with a friend about how dry it is and the fact that I'd be more fulfilled working on a project and couldn't wait for that. We hav…
Awesome! I have been trying the same sort of thing and documenting it here: http://mksht.crisnoble.com I was inspired by: http://mroosendaal.prosite.com/628/612/work/msced and http://designitcodeit.com/ Plus Mig Reyes's quote "Just make a bunch of shit" or the more eloquent way that Ira Glass put it "the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish…
It is funny. I was talking to a kid that was learning to play guitar because he wanted to play cover songs, and was frustrated by the lessons that seemed to have nothing to do with what he wanted. I told him that he didn't have to wait even one more day, since playing covers songs is one of the best ways in which you learn guitar. His ultimate goal could be accomplished almost immediately by choosing one song he liked that only had 3 chords, and just strumming those three cords over and over again in succession until it didn't sound half bad. Would take less than a week, -tops.
It's the same principle, and one I value highly. I think tackling a new discipline, and the wave of information that rushes toward you as you put your toe in the water can sometimes distract us from simple grounded approaches that we know have worked well for us in the past.
Thank you for the links!