How I taught myself programming

Learning how to code is not so hard but if you try to do it on your own, it can become the hardest thing to do if you do it the wrong way.

Right now in 2017, I’m 16 years old, I’ve been learning to code since I was 12 and I was lucky to have found an easy way to learn how to code. Now, I want to share my story for those who just getting started to learn how to code or having a hard time learning it (believe me it’s pretty simple if you do it right).

First time looking at the code, boring !

When I started learning coding, my first move was to search for videos on Youtube. But which one should I choose to learn first? There are so many languages and I didn’t even know what they can do. At that time, website development is still a new concept to me and I only know the word “software”, so I started finding videos about software development, and c# came to me. That was a wrong move, a terrible move, after a week watching videos about c#, I’m bored. When learning c# the first thing they teach was to make a simple console application and what I expected was a nice program with buttons and text boxes, etc. But they keep teaching about the black screen with some boring white text. “That’s it! Maybe coding is not my thing, maybe we aren’t made for each other, I quit !” — I said to myself.

The passion brought me back

So, for 2 days, I stopped learning programming, for 2 days, coding is just white text and black console no more, no less! Fortunately, during the time giving up programming, I remembered the reason why I started to learn coding — the beauty in how everything works just with some lines of code. I jump back to my computer and start searching for something else about coding. After a while, I found some interesting videos about something called website development. The first example that I ran, it only has a big black “Hello World” text on a white background, but for me, it has opened a whole world of possibilities.

I spent all my free time to study it, I even refused to play outside with my friends. Since then, life is just me, my code, and awesome web pages on the browser! “Wow coding is so much fun ! how did I not watch this video at the beginning” — I said to myself with happiness.

Here comes the hard time!

For some people, hard time when learning programming is when they stuck with some bugs and can’t find the way to solve it, but for me, hard time is when I can’t balance the time for homework and the time for programming. Asian families are always wanted their kid to be the smartest kid in the class, so that equal with they will put the heaviest pressure on their kid, and that kid must study very hard in order to get the high score! My family is not an exception but my parent is unlike other parents when I got the average score for the exam, they will not scold me but instead, they will ask why and if I can fix my mistakes if I do the exam again. The thing they want me to understand is marks are not important, only how much knowledge that you earned after study will decide how successful you will be in the future.

So, from one of the best students in the class, I became the average student because I spent more time on learning programming :’( but I managed to pull-through that hard time and keep walking on the way that I chose.

You have to be passionate enough about something to study it.

The fun begins!

After study basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript, I watched many videos about PHP language and started to practice to make a complete website both front-end and back-end with database and stuff.

While learning PHP I realize that I’ve understood the concept of arrays, loop, etc. Therefore, I went back on studying c#, it was a success! The purpose of teaching console application is to help people to understand the basic concept and usage of components like data types, loops, if else, etc, and I’ve got all of it while study PHP so I skipped it to study window form application.

Done with the basics, what to do next?

When I studied all the basic about web-developing languages including

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• PHP

and software-developing language:

• C#

I dig deeper into the languages that I learned and started to learn other “hot” languages. So, how is a language considered a “hot” one? The answer is simple, I went to IT job finding website and look for languages that are ubiquitous:

• https://stackoverflow.com/jobs
• http://www.dice.com/
• https://itviec.com/ (This website is only for Vietnamese developers)

When going to those websites, I can learn a lot about the world trend in programming, what frameworks do companies like, which language is favoured these days, etc.

In conclusion

When study programming, I recommend going from the easy-fast-result language such as HTML, CSS, JS, PHP. The reason why I chose PHP was because it’s easy to set up (almost all free website hosting support it) it will help speed up the learning process and alleviate the chance you will give up study when you can’t set up the coding environment. When you’ve absorbed a great amount of knowledge about

• Data types
• Loops (for, while, for-each)
• If else
• Switch case

Then, you are ready to study other languages like C#, Java, Python, etc. I also recommend that Python is a great start when you start learning about other languages besides web-developing languages.

Google is your best friend, stack overflow is your co-worker but don’t rely on them too much.

I hope you guys know how to start learning programming and what to do after reading this, but remember this method worked for me but I can’t guarantee it will work for you, so it up to you, you can combine my method to someone else’s method to create your own method, be creative ;)