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Though I'm able to manage coding but I guess people don't know why they are coding, how come it'll help the world

dragonsky67 10y ago
I think you may be on to something here. I have always wanted to be a programmer, but for a long time may attempts to learn a number of different programming languages came to nothing. This all changed when my wife finally got sick of me bemoaning my failure and persuaded me to take on a part time computer science degree. Ok, there were a couple of other reasons to do it, but in essence I was scratching an itch. The courses I studied during the degree not only gave me a direction for my learning, in that I had to produce the required program to meet the requirements of an assignment, but I also learned that there is a lot more to learning to program (or code if you insist) than just learning the semantics of the chosen language. I think there are a few things that those who want to learn how to code (ok you win) need to keep in mind. - Programming big things is really hard. You are not going to be able to build anything more than a fairly simple application without a lot of work and experience. - You really need a purpose for learning. Without this, you will have followed the bouncing ball on a bunch of exercises and still not have any idea why you have done it. - You need to make mistakes. Without making mistakes you will again just have followed the bouncing ball on a bunch of exercises. It is when you have to find what you did wrong that you start to learn. This is not a typing exercise, you need to understand what you are putting on the screen and the only way to do that is to make mistakes and fix them. - You need to be willing to hack things around. Don't just do the exercises, they are just typing practice. Take the code you have written in the exercise and do something different with it. If you are playing with graphic routines, see if you can make it into a simple game, or make it draw something different. If you are playing with text, see how many ways you can put the a set of words together that make sense. Play with your code, this is meant to be fun. Remember how you used to feel when you were playing with Lego when you were a kid and see if you can capture that same feeling. Ok, Lego was a lot more forgiving in how you put it together, but you will learn a lot more once you start playing with programming, than you will ever learn from following exercises. The parent comments that they have to learn a bunch of libraries to do anything useful. Start with something simpler, you don't need to do a full GUI application in the first week. See if you can make something that works just from the command line. There is a lot of very useful programs that work just by digesting a text file and producing some output. Yes you will eventually have to learn a number of libraries, but remember you have to walk first.

I think you may be on to something here. I have always wanted to be a programmer, but for a long time may attempts to learn a number of different programming languages came to nothing. This all changed when my wife finally got sick of me bemoaning my failure and persuaded me to take on a part time computer science degree. Ok, there were a couple of other reasons to do it, but in essence I was scratching an itch. The courses I studied during the degree not only gave me a direction for my learning, in that I had to produce the required program to meet the requirements of an assignment, but I also learned that there is a lot more to learning to program (or code if you insist) than just learning the semantics of the chosen language. I think there are a few things that those who want to learn how to code (ok you win) need to keep in mind. - Programming big things is really hard. You are not going to be able to build anything more than a fairly simple application without a lot of work and experience. - You really need a purpose for learning. Without this, you will have followed the bouncing ball on a bunch of exercises and still not have any idea why you have done it. - You need to make mistakes. Without making mistakes you will again just have followed the bouncing ball on a bunch of exercises. It is when you have to find what you did wrong that you start to learn. This is not a typing exercise, you need to understand what you are putting on the screen and the only way to do that is to make mistakes and fix them. - You need to be willing to hack things around. Don't just do the exercises, they are just typing practice. Take the code you have written in the exercise and do something different with it. If you are playing with graphic routines, see if you can make it into a simple game, or make it draw something different. If you are playing with text, see how many ways you can put the a set of words together that make sense. Play with your code, this is meant to be fun. Remember how you used to feel when you were playing with Lego when you were a kid and see if you can capture that same feeling. Ok, Lego was a lot more forgiving in how you put it together, but you will learn a lot more once you start playing with programming, than you will ever learn from following exercises. The parent comments that they have to learn a bunch of libraries to do anything useful. Start with something simpler, you don't need to do a full GUI application in the first week. See if you can make something that works just from the command line. There is a lot of very useful programs that work just by digesting a text file and producing some output. Yes you will eventually have to learn a number of libraries, but remember you have to walk first.