So you want to code
Being a software developer most of my career let me say two things.
- It’s hard
- It’s infuriating
Do you enjoy solving problems? No? Don’t code then, because that’s what coding is. Find something you enjoy and do that because when the chips are down and you need to plough on it’s easier to do when it’s something your interested in. It carries you through.
Ok so you like coding. It’s fun. Well now you need to know the basics. The basics of what?
- Bash (also called the terminal. As a coder you will be spending a LOT of time in this. So you need to know how to; go to different directories, see what files are there, move files around, change permissions, etc...)
- Git (this is very important. We change code all the time. Why did we change that? We can’t remember. It was last year. That’s why we keep a history of what we changed. Also there are a lot of Oooo-I-want-to-change-this-but-I-dont-want-to-break-everything moments, & that’s were Git comes in)
- Programming Language (pick one that you like and use it from the terminal. See how it runs. Pass inputs to it like your name and get it to print it out. Expand the script. Get it to get some price data from Yahoo finance. Get it to print this if a stock is above this or something else if it is below it. Build build build)
Now things will go wrong and things will break. If this happens go over to stackoverflow.com. It will help you solve those problems.
Coding and building things can be very rewarding, but it’s not easy.
Here's another opinion.
Even if you don't "enjoy solving problem", whatever it means, you can still try to code. See if you like it. That's the best way to know if you like something, or if you don't.
Here's my experience: more you do something, more you invest some time and try to improve, more you'll like it.
Bash and git are tools to solve some problems. As a beginner, you won't have these problems. I would advice to try to code, and focus on making it working (aka "something appears on the screen").
If you try to learn everything at the same time, you will never make it.
Don't even try to "learn a programming language". Begin with one, whatever it is, and play with it to accomplish a small goal. Very small. Then, you can make it bigger, and bigger. But begin small, go step by step, and enjoy!
Good point.
There are a lot of resources out there that help you get up and running and programming quickly.
https://www.w3schools.com/ - For HTML and CSS
https://www.tehplayground.com/ - For PHP
https://code.sololearn.com/#py - For Python
For whatever you looking to code in just Google the language your looking for and the word 'playground' (i.e. 'Ruby playground') and you'll find a number of sites out there where you can start coding straight away.