My personal struggles with learning how to program
1–10 of 50 posts
Re: My personal struggles with learning how to program
#2Short and to the point. Good stuff. Hey guys, in your opinion, what language should I learn first? I am new to this and I will be going to codecademy and other sites. What is the most useful language for web apps and such. For example, what if I wanted to build useful things like my own product hunt.
Re: My personal struggles with learning how to program
#3I learned how to program when I was 30. I actually found it really natural and easy.
Now (one year later) I work fulltime as the programmer for a small games company.
So age is certainly no barrier.
Re: My personal struggles with learning how to program
#4Short and to the point. Good stuff. Hey guys, in your opinion, what language should I learn first? I am new to this and I will be going to codecademy and other sites. What is the most useful language for web apps and such. For example, what if I wanted to build useful things like my own product hunt.
Probably JavaScript at first if you're web app focused. Then either expand to NodeJS or learn another language for the back end like Ruby, Python, Java (which is not JavaScript), C#, PHP etc. One you learn a language or two, picking up more becomes exponentially easier as the majority of the concepts transfer.
Re: My personal struggles with learning how to program
#5The semi-colon thing to me really drives home the point that when I'm faced with a problem, I just feel so very stupid, so very incompetent, and then when I have a breakthrough (usually by letting my subconscious work on the problem for a while), I completely forget that I ever had a problem at all, and completely forget all of the misery I suffered through while it was a problem.
Re: My personal struggles with learning how to program
#6Short and to the point. Good stuff. Hey guys, in your opinion, what language should I learn first? I am new to this and I will be going to codecademy and other sites. What is the most useful language for web apps and such. For example, what if I wanted to build useful things like my own product hunt.
Pick one of PHP / Python / Ruby for the web.
With ruby, use rails. With python, use django. With PHP, be wary! (but it's incredibly widespread, so it should still be included here).
Learn javascript as well, as you can't avoid it entirely.
Use codecademy for the bare essentials, explanation, and then jump to framework-specific tutorials. Build your knowledge from there by building new sites or new features on your existing site.
If you want me to narrow it down and choose for you, here's basically your whole stack: Python, Django, Heroku deployment, Postgresql, jQuery, (HTML/CSS obv).
A year or two of full-time, focused work at this and you're more qualified than plenty of already-employed developers.
Re: My personal struggles with learning how to program
#7The semi-colon thing to me really drives home the point that when I'm faced with a problem, I just feel so very stupid, so very incompetent, and then when I have a breakthrough (usually by letting my subconscious work on the problem for a while), I completely forget that I ever had a problem at all, and completely forget all of the misery I suffered through while it was a problem.
Two other ways to have your breakthrough: take a walk, and rubber duck debugging: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
I've solved so, so many tough bugs while writing an email for help. I had to explain the problem with enough depth, and try all the things I know they'd say "have you tried X", before I sent it--and the solution appeared. That's RDD, essentially, with the fallback of getting help if you don't find your own answer!
Re: My personal struggles with learning how to program
#8Short and to the point. Good stuff. Hey guys, in your opinion, what language should I learn first? I am new to this and I will be going to codecademy and other sites. What is the most useful language for web apps and such. For example, what if I wanted to build useful things like my own product hunt.
If your objective is to build web apps, you won't get anywhere without knowing at least some Javascript. If you want to go server-side, I'd suggest Go.
That said: If you want to learn programming, just do it. Doesn't really matter what you choose now, at some point you'll think "Language X would come in handy now, I wish I'd learnt that instead". Resist the temptation to switch to something else, and stick with your choice for long enough that you can look at non-trivial projects and can sketch the implementation in your head and identity trouble spots. If you keep jumping between languages, you'll waste a ton of time learning syntax that could've been spent learning more about programming as a practice. Anyway, as you get more experienced, picking up new languages becomes easy (provided they're moderately similar to _something_ you already know) so there's not much pressure to do it right away.
Re: My personal struggles with learning how to program
#9Short and to the point. Good stuff. Hey guys, in your opinion, what language should I learn first? I am new to this and I will be going to codecademy and other sites. What is the most useful language for web apps and such. For example, what if I wanted to build useful things like my own product hunt.
Pick one of PHP / Python / Ruby for the web. With ruby, use rails. With python, use django. With PHP, be wary! (but it's incredibly widespread, so it should still be included here). Learn javascript as well, as you can't avoid it entirely. Use codecademy for the bare essentials, explanation, and then jump to framework-specific tutorials. Build your knowledge from there by building new sites or new features on your ex…
> With ruby, use rails.
I'd suggest Sinatra instead, and find some smaller ORM to go with it. There's _way_ too much magic going on in Rails to make for a good place to start.
Re: My personal struggles with learning how to program
#10Short and to the point. Good stuff. Hey guys, in your opinion, what language should I learn first? I am new to this and I will be going to codecademy and other sites. What is the most useful language for web apps and such. For example, what if I wanted to build useful things like my own product hunt.
My son has been working with Code Academy recently. I've only briefly looked at it so hopefully someone else will correct me if I'm wrong.
A lot of what they have available is web based - e.g. learning javascript, html, php, css, etc.
IMHO you would be better off starting with python (or maybe ruby), which is also available at Code Academy. Learn to make simple programs on the command line before you jump into higher level languages and combining them with mark up. And, really, python is pretty high level as well so the learning curve shouldn't be too steep.
I started with Visual Basic many years ago and in hindsight I didn't really "get" programming by learning VB. I did some great stuff with it but until I learned some C and Perl I really didn't understand much about what goes on at the OS level. Once I learned to do things "the hard way" doing things with VB, javascript and combining Perl and HTML made a lot more sense to me and made it easier to step back and debug when things went wrong.