A Guide by Beginner on how to Learn to Code — Part 1
Before starting up, let me tell you about myself in brief.
I am a Mechanical Engineering Graduate, So it might be weird for you, and you might say Hey Gurpreet, how come coding to you?? So let me tell you, something that fuels me to learn something new to keep me updated.
“In the time of changes, learners inherit the earth while learned one find themselves beautifully equipped with the world that no longer exists.” — Eric Hoffer
This quote act as a constant motivation for me to learn something new. So, this time I started to learn to code because it fascinates me, how simple lines of code can make our life easier, be it Facebook, Flipkart, Gmail, etc.
So, I said to myself, “Hey Gurpreet, get ready for something new.” And here I am started with web development.
So, let’s deep dive into my style of learning new things.
How to Get Started?
See, I know, learning something new can little bit be tricky for someone who is quite busy in his job or work, but it is also true that we tend to take out time for something that fascinates us. So the time problem goes out of the equation.
The second question that comes to our mind is “ From where should I learn?” The answer to this is very simple, Google it, because, in the age of information technology, good knowledge is freely available.
So, now let me tell you how I started, since, time was not an issue for me, finding information was key, so to start on how to learn code, my younger brother helped me out with a website called freecodecamp.com which provides free access to learn to code. Youtube was also one of the sources of learning.
Finding the Goal
It’s very important to understand why are we doing this?
In my case, I was fascinated by the fact that creating something that solves the problem ( in my case, I am solving mine :) creating a web app that would help me to track my monthly dairy products bill.).
So, a goal speeds up your process of learning.
Which Languages to learn
In today’s world, there are so many languages and frameworks you can learn and go on to build out something cool for yourself.
But, how to select which language to learn?
Again…. Google it.
After googling, I got into some conclusions for web:
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CSS, and Javascript are a must!!
So, to explain to you how they work, consider an example:
Suppose, we are building a house, the first step is to create a design, then after finalization of design actual building of houses starts.
Firstly, the structure of the house is created, now in the world of Web, HTML helps out to structure our website, i.e. what is what in our website.
HTML is a very important language since it helps the crawlers (compare it with the postman, who find our home with our exact address.) what information our page contains, and provide the relevant information to the user who searched something, for example, if I search for India in any search engine, the search engine provides me with results related to India, how they do it?
Kudos to HTML.
Secondly, after completing our house structure, we don’t go and start living in it. Why?? Because something is missing. And that something is the decoration of our house.
In the world of Web, decoration commonly known as styling is provided by CSS, So when we see the latest websites, they are very beautiful, these websites are decorated with the help of CSS.
So, with HTML & CSS, we can create a website.
To make our websites interactive, we have a language called JavaScript. So, it helps us to provide flavor on our website, i.e. to make our website dynamic.
HTML, CSS and Javascript help to make the Front-end of the websites.
So, this is it for the first part.
In the second part, I would be discussing the back-end of the websites.
I hope you guys liked it.
I will see you in the next part. See ya…
