Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I'm interested in learning, really learning, programming language, but the resources I've found online haven't been doing it for me. I've been thinking about taking an accredited correspondence course in something like object oriented programming, but I want to find something very low cost, as currently I'm unemployed and don't have a lot of money to spend.
It isn't enough clear from your message what you want. If your task is to become a professional programmer then you must get a serious education (hundreds and thousands hours of study).
But there is one more opportunity. You can enter Mikhail Portnov Computer School and become a specialist in software testing.
If it's only your hobby then it would be useful for you to buy a good book. The book can be your main tool in studying and online resources can be a good addition.
Look at edx.org and take a real programming class from a top university like MIT or Harvard. You can pay $50 for a certificate of completion. If you put the time in, you can learn a ton. These courses are NOT easy.
I learned a lot more in my MIT python course than I did in any of my "accredited" community college programming courses. Those were so easy after MIT.
It isn't enough clear from your message what you want. If your task is to become a professional programmer then you must get a serious education (hundreds and thousands hours of study).
You absolutely do not need a "serious education" to become a professional programmer.
The industry is full of people that don't have any degrees, or even certifications.
That doesn't mean that you won't have to put thousands of hours into learning, and years of time into it, but many companies are just as likely to hire someone with no degree, but proven experience (and there are lots of ways to gain and demonstrate experience).
Let's be careful to recognize the difference between programming and coding. In my career, programming was a skill for taking a problem and organizing/breaking the problem down to a procedure(s) that could be handled by a computer. Coding was taking the procedure and reducing it to a series of commands and steps that could be interpreted by a computer (technically compiled or interpreted by another program resident in the computer). These are different but overlapping things, especially since they're often combined into one step for simple problems.
Programming (as in breaking down a problem into steps) is universal, unlike coding with a specific language. But don't worry, in learning a language you'll begin to think in terms of the program and things will start to fall together.
IMHO, it doesn't matter much what language you begin with - just start somewhere, preferably where you can get help online or in a class, since coding has little tolerance for errors, and debugging until you have some experience can be maddening.
I made this into a sign and put it on the back of my office!
To the OP: As mentioned before, your purpose isn't clear. If you're trying to learn for a hobby, above is good advise.
If you're trying to become employable, then your competing with those others who have already spent thousands of hours in learning situations (schools, night classes, self taught, whatever).
The best general advice I've heard was to find a firm that does your dream job. Email their HR dept and ask them,
"What skills and certifications would your firm require to consider someone doing this kind of work?"
That way you have a set of well-defined goals.
Let's be careful to recognize the difference between programming and coding. In my career, programming was a skill for taking a problem and organizing/breaking the problem down to a procedure(s) that could be handled by a computer. Coding was taking the procedure and reducing it to a series of commands and steps that could be interpreted by a computer (technically compiled or interpreted by another program resident in the computer). These are different but overlapping things, especially since they're often combined into one step for simple problems.
Programming (as in breaking down a problem into steps) is universal, unlike coding with a specific language. But don't worry, in learning a language you'll begin to think in terms of the program and things will start to fall together.
IMHO, it doesn't matter much what language you begin with - just start somewhere, preferably where you can get help online or in a class, since coding has little tolerance for errors, and debugging until you have some experience can be maddening.
One of the best and most relevant advices on topic, imho.
I am an IT guy but not a programmer. I can barely do intermediate level scripting, at best. I have had the urge to jump onto learning a "real" programming language for a long while and have tackled a few different ones but I quit after a few hours/days/... with all of them.
None of them was the actual problem. It was my lack of not knowing which programming language to pick because I didn't have a real purpose to learn one. Learning a programming language just for the sake of learning is silly, and I believe it makes the process harder even if you didn't eventually gave up like I did.
#1 - Don't worry about the language. Decide what you want to accomplish aka what do you want this app to do for you? Do you want to create an app for mobile devices? Create an app to be used as a Windows Desktop app? For web development?
Once you figure out what your goal is, then picking the suitable programming language will be much easier.
One of the main reason I stuck with scripting (Batch/PowerShell) because the available scripting languages were more than enough to accomplish system administration tasks I needed to do.
You can easily download the (free) Community Edition of Visual Studio which is an amazing package and will prompt you during installation to see what you want to use it for so it changes installation packages based on that. You can select multiple ones but it just takes more space and download/install time goes up. There is a huge online community for it where you can ask question, get help and even codes from others.
If you go with Visual Studio, it has it own native IDE which is really good.
But if you are going to learn Python, Ruby or some other non-MS programming language, then I do recommend you get yourself a good (free) IDE(Eclipse, NetBeans, etc.) that suits the language you will be learning. Also, get yourself a GitHub account to access a boat load of shared code from others.
Search YT and eBooks sites to obtain study/learning material. There are abundant free resource only a search engine away.
Hey thanks for the GitHub link.
I'm just undertaking my coding/programming/IT journey. I did Computing in school and at College but didn't take it seriously enough and went into a totally different field. Now in my 30's I want to take it up again. Have some grasp in Visual Basic, Javascript, HTML & CSS but it's a bit of a blur now.
Currently learning Python and getting acquainted with Cloud Computing which I imagine doesn't require coding knowledge but I still want to explore both, see what sits best.
Hey thanks for the GitHub link.
I'm just undertaking my coding/programming/IT journey. I did Computing in school and at College but didn't take it seriously enough and went into a totally different field. Now in my 30's I want to take it up again. Have some grasp in Visual Basic, Javascript, HTML & CSS but it's a bit of a blur now.
Currently learning Python and getting acquainted with Cloud Computing which I imagine doesn't require coding knowledge but I still want to explore both, see what sits best.
Cloud computing in the real world does require coding knowledge to some degree. Resources in a cloud are typically managed by scripts (chef, terraform, groovy, etc).
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
