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If you've done Codecademy, you should understand the basics (what is a variable, what are functions, etc). The next thing to do is pick a project and build it.
by DanielStraight 13y ago
If you've done Codecademy, you should understand the basics (what is a variable, what are functions, etc). The next thing to do is pick a project and build it. A good place to start is something like a blog, or calendar, or some other simple application like that. Heck, an HN clone would be a good starting project.
Once you pick a project, just take it one step at a time, asking for help when you get stuck. Don't worry about making it production-ready. It's inevitably going to be full of vulnerabilities and bad coding practices, don't worry about it. There isn't a programmer on Earth who hasn't looked at their own code from 5 years ago and thought, "What on Earth was this guy thinking when he wrote this???" Build a few projects and you will pick stuff up as you go. Once you feel like you really understand what you're doing, then you can focus on making something production-ready. For right now, just get a few things built without worrying about the details.
Read this: http://prog21.dadgum.com/188.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/188.html
When you're starting out, do that. Don't worry about full understanding. Get a solution out there, even an imperfect and brute-force one. Obviously, you don't want to stay at that level, but like I said, you're going to hate your code 5 years from now anyway, so don't worry about it too much.
Read this too, the first quote on this page: http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/113989.Ira_Glass http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/113989.Ira_Glass
- gotrecruit 13y agoyes i feel that i do understand the most basic stuff, plus i've taken some programming-ish classes in college as well (such as VBA for Excel and another freshman class which also dabbled a little in basic programming principles). i'm just at a complete loss as to how to go from that basic understanding, to actually being able to write something useful and then subsequently be good enough to be hired as a junior or entry level developer. my ultimate end-goal is to develop software for my own startup because i have many ideas which i have previously tried to hire outside developers to implement, but failed miserably. i'll read those links right now! thanks!
- DanielStraight 13y agoI really think you need to start with a very simple project that you can see through to completion. Writing your own blog or calendar app is pretty simple if you don't try to add any advanced features (like WYSIWYG editing or something like that). For a blog, just make a new post page where you can type in a new post and then an index page that shows all posts. If that's too simple, make a log-in system and support for multiple authors. For a calendar, just make it so you can click a day and type in an event which gets stored and shown when you load the page. If that's too simple, do multi-day events and recurring events. Or build a week view and a single day view as well. This is the kind of project you would build in classes. It's the only way to really learn how everything fits together to make a full web app. Learning on the job is pretty much the only way to really learn software development.
- coldpie 13y agoYou have to crawl before you can walk. You'll learn with practice, probably years of practice. Start with small things. Make a HackerNews clone with PHP and a database. Make a Snake clone with Python, but don't use PyGame.