So you want to learn to program, but where should you start?
Have you thought about learning how to program and writing software? Have you thought about what a useful skill that might be? And have you thought about how that skill could change your life?
Well my personal opinion is that programming may be the most useful technical skill a person can acquire. The reason is that you can apply it to any other field or aspect of your life.
You can use programming to solve complex problems and you can use programming to save yourself a bunch of time. I’ll be honest with you, I have been programming for over 15 years now so I have a some experience behind my belt. But I believe anyone can learn to program and it doesn’t take 15 years of experience to build something useful.
But where should you start? Well I already told you in some of my previous blog posts that I think git is a very important tool to learn before you get started. It is one of the foundation skills that will make your programming life much easier. I wish they had taught it to us while I was in school!
But for today, we are actually going to dive into a few of the basics. And the first one is what programming language you should choose to get started.
What language should you choose?
This could be highly debated among other software developers, but I’m going to recommend that you start with a programming language called python.
Python is my favorite language. I have used it to build multiple programs, but it is also one of the easiest languages to get started. The tools needed to get started are either already installed on your computer, or it is easy to install them. And it is a language where you can start with just one line of code. Yes one line of code can be considered a program.
How do I learn the basics?
The best way to get started is by going through a tutorial. Until I have my own programming tutorials, I am going to point you in the direction of a great resource to get started here.
Follow through the tutorials one by one and build on the skills as you build more complex programs.
Learn the Basics
As you being to learn these new skills, I want you to also start applying them to your every day life.
Start thinking about ideas where you could write a software program to solve a problem in your own life. Do you want to keep track of your To Do list? Do you want to build a website? You can think of so many ideas, it just takes a bit of thinking outside the box.
So for now, get started with the basics and we will move on from there.
