The occupation of a software engineer is considered to be one of the most difficult to master. This is a reason why beginners fear the difficulties and lose interest in learning new technologies. In this short article, we are going to dispel the most common myth about the difficulty of learning to program and show you the option to learn programming in a fun way.
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Why is programming so hard to learn?
The most common opinion about it is that the process of programming itself requires huge intellectual capabilities. So, to learn to program one needs to possess high intellectual capabilities.
However, let’s be honest – to start writing code, you do not need to be brainy, it’s enough to have motivation, interest, and discipline. If you are open to obtaining new knowledge and ready to apply the acquired skills in practice, then you will succeed in learning to program.
Is it possible to enjoy learning and still obtain results?
There are many pieces of advice and methods all over the internet, we can just pinpoint some of them for you below, but each beginner coder is an individual and everyone has their reasons and motivations to learn to program, so each path will be unique.
1. Manage your time effectively
Start learning intensively, for example, and dedicate 3-4 hours per day to the basic theory necessary to understand the main principles of modern programming languages, after this decide how much time per day you can spend on some educational program – it may be an online tutorial, a book that will teach you coding, etc.
2. Find a good motivating tutorial, there are plenty of them on the internet.
Sometimes we are receiving questions from our readers about how to start programming in C# for Windows. Here is a way! Our colleagues – software developers from Codeasy.net are working hard on their educational project and we believe that you may find it useful.
Guys use an unusual and original approach to the learning process at Codeasy.net. They’ve created an online educational course, with the main aim to teach beginners programming in a story-telling and interactive way. It is designed for absolute beginners and does not require any prior knowledge to start.
The magic comes with an adventure story of the tutorial which is mixed with an explanation of programming principles (C# programming language). It is more attractive to learn programming by saving the world than if someone tells you to write a “for” loop, right? The main character of the tutorial story – Teo, is fighting against robots in the future and tries to save humanity.
Registration at Codeasy allows the user to solve tasks by writing a code in an online editor directly at Codeasy, in the web browser, or using the Codeasy Visual Studio extension. Besides, the developers of the course prepared other goodies for beginner coders, which makes the learning process at Codeasy fun and exciting.
4. Take part in some coding challenges.
When you are learning alone – the process may seem boring but think of finding like-minded people, or rather a community of people taking part in a challenge. There are challenges like 100HoursofCode, 100DaysOfCode, EastCanCode, CodeChef, Coderbyte, and many others all over the web. In that case, you will have the motivation of completing the challenge moreover, be the first in it! You’ll use all possible ways to be first, you’ll recall all the theories you’ve ever learned, books read, and tasks completed, all for getting more and more scores in the challenge.
5. Solve some real tasks.
Perhaps the most important thing that can be taken out of the learning process are the skills that can be applied in real life. While learning you need to get as much practice as you can. In this case, the most useful are those resources that move you to the environment where you have to solve some tasks.
Nevertheless, after you finish your learning process try to create real tools. The thing is abstract formulations of problems, endless points A and B, hypothetical pools with hypothetical cranes, from which hypothetical water flows, are not interesting to anyone. The American mathematics teacher Dan Meyer proposed to return the tasks to their original meaning: for example, instead of a classical illustration in the form of an abstract barrel, he shows his students a video of the tank standing in his yard, in which water is being collected. And so with any other task.
Here are some tips for you to start with to apply your programming skills at the very beginning of your software developer career path.
Conclusion
If you want to become a software engineer, then do not let anyone or anything get in the way of your goal. Do not let any traditional restrictions like the education system, age, occupation, or busyness at current work interfere with you. Remember, there are no right and wrong ways to achieve your goals.
At the same time, do not lose touch with reality and do not fall under the charm of the romance of Silicon Valley. Programming is not a wonderful tool that will save you from debt. You will have to get used to the idea that you are the one who solves the problems and learn industry news, framework, or programming language that you use.
Software development is a profitable business, but it requires some work to transform from a coder into a software engineer. If you show persistence, you can change not only your life but your whole way of thinking.
