this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
24 points (81.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43898 readers
1147 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You'll need a computer, doesn't matter if it's a desktop, an old laptop or whatever. You'll not be able to actually learn programming properly on a phone (besides theory..).
I like to suggest to get started with online Python courses: https://www.codecademy.com/learn/learn-python-3 (Needs a free account nowadays) where you'll learn the very basics of programming. What are variables? Conditions? Loops? Bit of object oriented programming (OOP) and so on.
After doing the course you very much have to download Python and work on your own computer (instead of in the browser) if you want to learn and experiment more.
Just to get started with the actual language doesn't matter much. Though at some point you should look at strongly typed languages (like C#) to get a feel for data types. What is an integer? Bool? Float? And so on, something that JavaScript and Python (to some degree) mostly hides from you. One step even further would be C++ where you learn about pointers, how memory works etc. but that's not necessary for the first year or so (and might only be "good to know" if you don't intend to go that low level).
At that point you can probably write whatever little program you want and get it to run. The next step is algorithms, design patterns, how to structure and organize code (concepts like SOLID), databases, source control, security and much more vague knowledge. That's where it gets difficult and some things you'll only pick up when actually working in a team.
This is the exact path I took, and I highly recommend it. Code academy python then immediately wrote some code to scrape some websites and email me if something I wanted to buy dropped to a price I'd be willing to spend.
I'd say all in all it took 3 weeks to a month, but I've been able to not code for months at a time and still feel comfortable when I come back.
I am NOT a programmer, I am someone who can cobble something together to accomplish a specific task. I never got to the more abstract concepts you listed, but maybe one day!