How to Learn to Program
By Dexter A Lowe
Introduction
Programming is a very useful and rewarding hobby. There are few better feelings than
when someone sees you using a program you lashed together to make your life easier and says
that it looks really useful. Most people have, at some point in their lives, really wanted
to be able to do something on their computer or phone and been unable to.
If you know a programming language, then there is often a fair chance that you can write
a program to accomplish that task yourself. While there are a huge number of programming
languages, many of them have a lot of similarities; this means that once you learn one
language quite well, in most cases you will be able to pick up a new one far quicker.
Limits
One thing that all new programmers must come to term with is the amount of time learning
a programming language takes. Although when you have become an expert you will be able to write
many programs quickly, you must remember that many programs have taken whole teams of expert
developers years to create.
It'is important to understand that knowing a programming language or even several is not
enough to write some of the more complex programs you have seen. Don't look upon this new
hobby as a way to save yourself a lot of money, as writing your own version of most of the
programs that you need to pay for now will be out of your reach.
The most important thing that a new programmer needs to know is that the "Learn Programming
in 24 hours" sort of books are simply not true. A more accurate title would be "Learn Programming
in 10,000 hours". If you put 24 hours or a week into learning a language you will not be creating
the next Windows or a new, state of the art game. It is possible to learn to write a program
in 10 minutes, and really all you need to learn a new language is your favourite search engine,
but you will not be an expert. The only way to become an expert is much like learning the violin;
the answer is practice, practice and practice some more.
Selecting Your First Language
Now that we have examined the limitations and handled some of the more unrealistic expectations,
those of you still wanting to learn to code will be happy to know that programming is not a
hard thing to start learning and will not require you to pay out huge sums of money. If you
are reading this article on-line, you already have the resources to start with some languages,
so let us consider what your first language ought to be.
Traditionally the first language a programming newcomer learns is either Visual Basic
or Python. The first thing to understand is that these two languages are very different. The
simplest difference is one of price. Python is totally free; you can start writing python now
with just a text editor on your computer, though if you are on Windows, you will probably need
to install it first.
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