The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code

    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.

Re: The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code

#5

Post by bradddd » Fri, Sep 07, 2012, 3:09 PM UTC

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 don't feel like you need to wrap your mind around every feature before you can begin. Great work and keep at it.

Re: The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code

#6

Post by albumedia » Fri, Sep 07, 2012, 3:20 PM UTC

Congrats 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.

Re: The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code

#7

Post by deveac » Fri, Sep 07, 2012, 3:22 PM UTC

crisnoble wrote: post #4

Best 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 have an extremely small, simple project that we've been talking about. Screw it. I'm dumping the book and starting on that as soon as I get home.

Exactly what I needed to read.

Re: The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code

#8

Post by barking » Fri, Sep 07, 2012, 3:27 PM UTC

albumedia wrote: post #6

Congrats 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 don't know why you were downvoted but there is definitely something to be said for what you argue.

Re: The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code

#9

Post by drcube » Fri, Sep 07, 2012, 3:28 PM UTC

bradddd wrote: post #5

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 configuration changes. Every time I've had a project in mind, I'm quickly in over my head. I'd like to move beyond scripting and actually build self contained software I can post on Github and give to my friends, but I guess I don't know where is a reasonable place to start.

Re: The 2 Biggest Mistakes I Made When Learning to Code

#10

Post by doktrin » Fri, Sep 07, 2012, 3:32 PM UTC

albumedia wrote: post #6

Congrats 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.

Agreed. I am largely self taught as well, and have found a lot of value in reading texts on CS / programming fundamentals :

  * Computer Architecture
  * Operating Systems
  * Algorithms
  * Data Structures
  * Database Fundamentals
  * etc.

In addition, more seminal-yet-not-directly-practical books such as SICP are quite valuable. I've been meaning to read TECS (a copy of which is staring at me as we speak), however I have not had the time to devote to its projects yet.

Edited to add :

In addition, reading up on web application architecture was quite helpful. This is increasingly important as modern frameworks may otherwise abstract away concepts to the point of making them very black-boxy.

That said, my goal was not to rush towards an MVP or prototype. I intend to be a competent developer first, and a founder second. If these were reversed, I might well have adopted the OP's approach instead.