Advice

Hey
My name is Anthony
I'm a nooby in need of lots of help
I've been trying to teach myself how to program... and it is hard without any guidance
I'm looking for a helpful community and want to make some online friends that can help me, and I want to help others as well when I learn the ways
I find programming very interesting, and even though I have only done a couple small things on codeacademy, I truly feel that I want to code as I progress into the future of my life
I hope it works out, and more importantly. I am going to make it work out as I haven't given up yet and don't plan on it
I would love any advice or guidance, I don't know what I'm doing and I really want to learn. Because I have been obsessed with this even though I'm getting no where fast :/
I'm thinking about changing my starting language to C, enough from me haha

 

Hey Anthony, Well believe it or not everybody learns at a difference pace and at different levels, and some are better at it then others, but programming is something that everybody can do! Coming someone who learned programming on his own i can share a few things with you that might help, Well i hope it helps anyways. First off, Start from something small and easy to tinker with, Like a scripting language, I started with AutoIT script, but something like php or something similar will be just as viable, Next sit down and think about what you want to do, Think small, don't think to far ahead because that's when things start to get complicated, Stay away from hello world examples and just google explicitly what it is you want to do and research each step accordingly, Don't skip ahead, and again the most important thing is google, Learning is much easier when you learn from example, and 9.99 times out of 10 somebody has already done and shared exactly what your trying to do, so the key is research, also youtube videos are a great interactive way to learn, Try and repeat what they're showing you.

once you feel comfortable with the basic syntax of the language your learning, you'll soon have a better grasp of understanding what's needed to meet certain coding requirements and the whole process will require less googling, and eventually you'll be coding on your own without the need of much research, But everybody even programmers that have been around for years still go back to researching, Programming is something you can never master, you can only just get better at it over time.

 

The question is : For which reasons do you want to learn ? Depending your answer you may choose different paths. If you are just looking for money, indeed you can start by learning PHP, you'll probably become an average coder, starting with a language like PHP give you most of the time bad practices and switching to languages more strict is a real pain, PHP is way too permissive for a beginner, and this is why you have so much difference in skills when you are looking for a PHP dev.

The first step when you want to learn programming is....a paper and a pen (and a bit of algorithm) once you have a basic knowledge of algorithms (wikipedia) then you can start your learning.

From my experience (13 years as developer) : Python and Java are the best first choices.

Java:
Pros : Portable, object oriented, powerful, most used language in the industry, give you the best practices.
Cons : Not the easiest language to learn especially when you are dealing with GUI.

Python :
Pros : Easy as hell, light core (and thus fastest runtime), readable (indentation over curly bracket), multiple inheritance...
Cons : Too readable (switching to another language is a pain in the ass)

In university and engineering school, you start by learning C/C++ then Java, then PHP. It's indeed the best path, but it's the harshest one...I assure you : You don't want to deal with pointers and C's syntax (<troll> no one should </troll>)

 

Yes in my view too Java is a nice language to start with.
All the best for your programming tryst.

 

Thanks guys! Iv'e decided to start with Python and I am interested in cyber security. I want to be a pen tester

 

C is a great programming language to start.
or you could try php or perl

 

I suggest you go with PHP first.