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Thoughts on teaching yourself programming?

dairyeater · 2016-08-10T09:43:02+00:00

I've been teaching myself for a little over two months. I'm slowly getting their. I feel like as long as I keep pushing myself, I can eventually...

dairyeater

August 10, 2016

0 upvotes

/r/askTRP

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Post Information

Title	Thoughts on teaching yourself programming?
Author	dairyeater
Upvotes	0
Comments	4
Date	August 10, 2016 9:43 AM UTC (9 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/askTRP
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/asktrp/comments/4x1d4h/thoughts_on_teaching_yourself_programming/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/askTRP/thoughts-on-teaching-yourself-programming.109525 https://theredarchive.com/post/109525

Comments

[–]Googoots1 point2 points3 points 9 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

I have been in software development for 30+ years. I went to a technical high school in the mid 80's and learned programming there, though that taught me only the basics. The more advanced things I learned on my own.

I was fortunate (I won't say "lucky" because I worked hard at it when most others in high school were getting high) that I got an internship in my senior year and I ended up working as a programmer at that company for 20 years.

That type of thing is unlikely to occur today. It's not because it "can't" be done... but my experience is that corporate HR departments have a knee jerk requirement for a degree (which I lack) or certain types of degrees, before you will even make it to the interview stage. I personally would probably never even get an interview at the company I currently work for - I have my job due to networking and experience - my employer is a former customer of my previous employer and knew me well.

Your best bet, after you feel you have taught yourself sufficiently, is to either freelance or try to work for a smaller company, which may be more open to taking that chance on a non-traditional route of someone with a CS degree.

Though you say you don't know a lot about accounting, you probably do know some. Much, much business software development involves accounting knowledge. I took two accounting classes and those, along with a typing class, have been invaluable to me as a programmer.

As my first programming teacher told us, when we balked at having to take a required accounting class, "what do you think people are going to pay you to program? Games?"

As for honing your skills, take a look at the /r/dailyprogrammer subreddit. Programming challenges are proposed, and then people post their solutions. Try some of them (start with those labled "[Easy]") and compare your solution to those posted. Even with my experience, I find it really interested to see how others approach a problem and solve it.

[–]from_the_ashes_me0 points1 point2 points 9 years ago (1 child) | Copy Link

Programming is one of those things that you can get a gist of by teaching yourself, but (IMO) would benefit from taking classes. When starting out, most programmers think in linear terms, as in they write scripts or programs that process in a linear fashion. It's relatively easy to teach yourself to code like that. Think Perl, Python, bash scripting.
It gets more difficult when you make the jump into object oriented programming, defining classes, inheritance, multi-dimensional arrays.
Another thing to understand is that a lot of programming isn't linear. Many applications rely on event handlers, so you have to change to a mindset of events kicking off blocks of code.

As far as tips on learning, it depends on what you want to do. Programming is a pretty wide field. Web development, service oriented architecture (ie. web services), command line scripting, application development, etc.

My suggestion is to get on something like Coursera (https://www.coursera.org/) and take a free course in Python to start out. Learn to solve problems with code; learn to define algorithms, learn arrays, etc.

As far as becoming self employed as a programmer, it's definitely possible, but not in the more traditional sense as in working for companies like CACI or SAIC as a programmer.

You'll need a CS degree for that, and not because of your coding skills, but more because you'll be lacking in understanding about things like accounting (used for a lot of business programming), system development life cycles, agile/scrum/waterfall/kanban development methodologies, secure coding, how to develop as part of a development team, collaboration tools like Jira and Confluence...

Job interviews in programming have little to do with what you've already done. Anybody can show blocks of code that they've taken from somewhere else. The way job interviews work in the coding field is that you very likely will sit down with the lead programmer for a project, and he'll ask you questions like:

Why is a Char array is preferred over a String for storing a password?

What is the difference between a linked list and an array data structure?

Write a quick program to implement a binary search algorithm in Java.

Programming as a career is a lot more than learning to write code. You can, however, do app development. Get an idea, learn Java, install the Android SDK, and make an app or two.

[–]dairyeater1 point 9 years ago [recovered] | Copy Link

[–]beginner_0 points1 point2 points 9 years ago (0 children) | Copy Link

What you need is a real project which you can then work on an learn things. Just be prepared to throw it all in the trash afterwards because it will 100% suck like every first project will. Maybe you can then redo it a second time but at least you should learn from the mistakes made.

Second point you really need to be the type for this. Else it will get frustrating quickly. And the frustration will come with maintenance. If you plan to sell stuff you need to maintain it and maintenance will be 80% of the whole project. You need to maintain build environment, track issues, fix issues, test new releases, do QA, make the release. It's a lot of non-coding work and you all have to do it yourself if you want to be self-employed.

Start using and learning tools like an IDE. You also absolutely need a source code repository. git is all the hype but I prefer mercurial and look at branching and versioning.

So eventually become self-employed maybe but it will take year(s). Making apps won't make you rich or even be able to live from it. A good app is pretty complex even more so if cross-platform.