Beginners often have this question of “How to learn programming”. This is an important question to ask and answer since things could make or break at this stage. So I will share a few points out of my own experience as well as industry recommendations.
Be passionate
To learn programming, you have to be passionate about it. You have to be passionate about creating something or building something. Don’t do it just for the sake that IT industry is hot at the moment or any other stupid reasons!! IT is not hot, IT is consolidating. IT will always grow but if you want to grow, you need to be passionate. So unless you have the passion, you cannot survive in the long term.
Program in your area of interest
This is going to make the difference. Try to program in your area of interest. Find out your area of interest. And do something in that area. After I created this Macro Assembler as part of the academic project that I described in the previous post, I went ahead and did two things.
Cricket Simulator game in C
I always loved cricket and so I started to create a cricket simulator game on my own. The journey was wonderful, because it had multiple modes such as One dayers, Test matches (Those were not the times of T20s). And I created the logic, the data, the algorithms, the strategies for the game and I coded them all. I used pointers, I used File system, String parsing, Pseudo-Random generation, etc. The point was I only used them when required in the game and not before.
Artificial Intelligence Scripting for Age Of Empires (I am a huge fan )
Since by now I was fairly confident of my programming abilities, I ventured into a new proprietary framework designed for Age of Empires game. Scripting That was
even more fun as you could control how the computer would play against humans.Moral: Programming in the area of interest will make your programming adventures more enjoyable!! And this helped me to have something to brag about during my campus interview.
Practice, practice and practice
Programmers love to code. They want to create things more and more efficiently. So all they need to do is practice, practice and practice. Practice definitely makes a Programmer perfect.
Review your own code
Reviewing your own code will give you a reality check as to where you currently are and where you are headed. Some of the simple things that you can easily review are:
1. Exception/Error handling
2. Comments
3. Naming conventions
4. Code Design
5. Modularity
6. Abstraction
Ask for opinions
When you feel that you need help in guiding you, please ask someone for help. It might be your friends, or an expert, or a public forum. Posting your code in a public forum will get you lots of opinions about your code. You will get some good critics also, that will help you to improve your coding skills.
Read good programming books / blogs
Programming is like any other subject. Easy to learn, but challenging to master. So you need to read a lot of books/blogs to keep on improving yourselves and apply those learning to your project. Improve your thought process and it will automatically shape you to become a much effective programmer.
So now that you know how to get started, why don’t you start some favorite pet project right away before even trying to move to the next chapter?