A guide to programming after learning a language
In this blog, we will discuss a few popular technologies used to convert your coding skills into a useful project/product. We will also look at a broad overview of different disciplines of computer science like artificial intelligence, software development, cyber security among many others.
What is a programming language anyways?
Lets forget everything about programming for now and ask ourselves, what is a language anyways? A language is a way to express our ideas to other human beings. A language by itself cant be used to build anything. Similarly, a programming language is just a language which can be used to communicate with a computer. A computer language by itself cant be used to build any projects (You could but that is a lot of work and there is no point in reinventing the wheel).
This is where technologies called frameworks and libraries come to out rescue. They are code that other developers have written and you can use to make your life easier. A few popular frameworks and libraries categorised according to the language they are written in:
- Javascript : The language of the internet
Nodejs — Used to run javascript outside a browser and build backend APIs using a framework called express
Reactjs , Vuejs and Angularjs — Three diiferent yet similar frameworks that help build the frontend of web applications.
2. Python : Beginners favourite language.
Django , Flask — Used to Build backend and sometimes even frontend of web applications
Numpy, Pandas , scikitlearn — Tools that are commonly used by data scientists and in machine learning.
3. Java
SpringBoot — Used to build web applications.
Kotlin — A separate language which is very similar to java, used to build android applications. Jetpack is the framework used with kotlin.
Do not feel overwhelmed by all the frameworks. You dont have to learn all of them. In fact, no one does. There are resources called documentation that are documents written by the developers of the framework which can be referred to while using the framework.
Disciplines of Computer Science
Web development :
I’m sure everyone uses web applications like YouTube, Facebook, Medium etc. These are web applications and the software engineers who develop these applications for the web are called web developers. Two broad categories within web development are backend development and frontend development. Frontend is the part of the web application that the user sees. It is what you are reading this blog on. It helps the user interact with the application. Backend on the other hand is the brain of the application. It is normally hosted on a server which u can access via the internet. It handles all the data storage and logic of the application.
Artificial Intelligence:
Computers have been designed to follow the instruction that we give them. They can’t think on their own, however artificial intelligence enables computers to think. You might wonder how. Vast amount of data is fed into mathematical and statistical models. This enables the mathematical models to optimise certain parameters and make prediction on new data.
Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence. ChatGPT which has gained a lot of popularity is a product built using AI.
Cyber Security
As everything we do is now going online, a lot of data is being generated. A lot of this data is secretive. It is important for companies to keep their data safe from hackers who try to access the secret data. Thus, a cyber security specialist helps organisation protect their data.
A certain type of cyber security professional called ethical hacker tries to break into the company’s network to evaluate the security of the organisation. Another cyber security professional called application security engineer reviews code written by software developers to ensure that there are no vulnerabilities in the code written by developers.
Conclusion
In this blog we learnt about what frameworks are and a few disciplines of computer science. Indeed there are several other disciplines not listed here, however my knowledge is limited to these disciplines and will be publishing blogs on projects focusing on these. In the next blog we will begin with our first project. We will build the backend of a time tracking application. See you there.
