How to Learn to Code

 How to Learn to Code

Hey Everyone! 

My name is Habib. So in this article I'm gonna show you how to learn to code the best resources available online how to choose a personal project to work on and my thoughts on getting a computer science degree or going to coding boot camp I actually briefly talked about this topic.

If you want to do some coding usually you first need to set up some kind of special environment on your computer and if you're beginner it's actually really easy to get stuck just trying to set up the right environment you know installing the right things and setting up the right things.

When it comes to building a personal project the most common question I get is how should I choose which project to work on there are basically three criteria. I would personally use for choosing which project to work on first of all you should choose something that you're interested in building or that you're interested in doing already so for example if you're like playing video games. You might want to create a simple video game and if you like photography maybe you can build a portfolio website where you can show off all your best photos and if you like trading stocks or even bitcoins. Maybe you can build a system that analyzes stock charts for you and whatever you choose it's really important to choose something that you can keep motivated about. 

The second point to consider is you should start 

with something that's really simple so if you want to be able to say a video game don't start with something really complex like legal lessons but start with something simpler like flappy bird or even tic-tac-toe and if you want to build a website don't start with something complete like Facebook but just start with a to-do list website and then go from there.

The third point to consider is 

ideally you should build something that's useful for yourself or for someone else and that way it's gonna give you extra motivation you know so that it works for yourself or for someone else and if you can say something like I built this thing and it was used by ten thousand people it's gonna look really good on your resume but that's kind of hard so I would say first focus on the first two criteria so at least find something that you're interested in building and that's pretty simple to build and just in case you don't have any ideas here are a few ideas for you to get started with a to-do list app or a website or something like Twitter but something that's much simpler than Twitter so just the ability to tweet and follow someone else and if you like video games start with something simple like Tetris Sudoku or just tic-tac-toe.      

Once you start learning programming fundamentals and 

once you start building your first personal project actually it's very likely that you get stuck at some point and it's very natural because you're beginner and programming is actually really hard but when you're stuck it's actually really important to know how to get help from other people and the first thing you should try is actually you should just use Google so let's say just as an example you've been building this program and don't worry too much about what it's doing and let's say it's going just fine buts only you get an error message so this is pretty similar to what a typical error message looks like it says recursion error here and then you have a bunch of nonsense here really and then here it says recursion error maximum recursion blah blah blah. 

Let's say you don't know what this error 

message means what you should do then is you should just copy this error message and then type that into Google and hopefully you'll be able to find someone else who had the same problem and then you'll be able to find an answer to how to solve that issue - and one trick. I sometimes do in Google is I put this error message in quotation marks and just like that I can tell Google to find webpages that have these exact same words in the exact same order because without these quotation marks sometimes Google finds webpages that are not directly related to what I'm looking for and once you start doing this this website called stuck overflow will come up over and over again in your Google results and it's like a Q&A website for software developers and it's one of the best resources for any programming related questions so when you have any programming related questions you should just first try using Google and Stack Overflow then if you can't find anything that's relevant on there you can also ask something yourself on Stack Overflow just keep in mind that it might take a while to get an answer say 2 to 3 weeks or longer other than that for asking questions I'd recommend web sites like Reddit for the learn programming subreddit.

You should try to get a job or an internship as soon as possible and ideally a paid one too so when you're learning everything on your own you might make a lot of mistakes but you might not even realize that so if you get a job and if you start working with other software engineers they'll be able to give you some feedback on your code so you'll be able to learn much faster and hopefully you'll be able to get paid at the same time and obviously there are different ways of applying for jobs like using LinkedIn.

I mostly talked about how to learn to code on your own so you might say what about going to a university or going to a coding bootcamp if you don't have a degree yet and if you're planning to get one soon. I definitely recommend computer science and that's partly because computer science will give you sort of fundamental knowledge that you need for writing efficient code. 

But if you already have a degree let's say in biology or art history or whatever I personally wouldn't take a second degree in computer science just to learn coding unless it's like a shorter program let's say for two years because I think addition of four years is just way too long and what about coding boot camps well. First of all in case you don't know what a coding boot camp is it's sort of like a private school you can go to for three to four months to learn to code basically and I think they're really good for the support systems they have so if you get stuck you can just ask questions and the pressure that's built in for you to learn at a set schedule so the downside of a coding boot camp is that it's kind of expensive.

This was our today's article, hope so it will help you to learn code in easy and efficient way a lot. I am Habib and I'll 

see you guys in the next article.