Learning to code while at uni

Definitely! I taught myself to code (admittedly at school rather than uni) and now do lots of big projects for people over the internet. If you are dedicated, you can make it happen

Good luck!

Thanks for the advice. What did you use to learn??

Posted from TSR Mobile

I used books, personally. Whilst there are tutorial series online, they tend not to be as comprehensive, well written, etc. etc., as a professional book. Of course I generalise but the quality of a book tends to be > quality of an internet tutorial series.

The biggest factor is continuity. You've got to make sure that you cover every basic section. OK, so it doesn't really matter whether you learn about for or while loops first, but if you are reading bitty internet tutorials and miss out on while loops completely, you've got a bit of a problem.

Personally, I would recommend a book. A lot of people will disagree with me (and perhaps even show that in the form of a neg rather than a discussion), but I think you will find that most people who have learned to code a little will have read internet tutorials, and those who dedicated themselves to learning to code well have used a book at least somewhere.

I am not saying that you shouldn't use the internet. Completely the opposite. Use a book to structure your learning, and then use internet tutorials to fill it out. When you come across the chapter on design patterns, don't just learn the two or three examples. Trawl the internet and look at (tutorials for) other design patterns.

The choice is of course still yours. The other (personal) reason I went for a book is that I struggle to read a lot of text off computer screens. A paper book was so much easier.


As for the specifics, I learned C# initially (a lot of people will suggest other languages, often Java or Python or something - at the end of the day any language is perfectly good to get started on, just choose one and stick to it). I chose C# because firstly it's an easy language (and the .net framework takes most of the pain out of programming), secondly it's quite useful as a lot of real jobs will actually use C#, thirdly it's a C based language so is easy to transition to C++ at a later date, fourthly it's very easy to make graphics applications, fifthly the documentation is amazing for it, and sixthly there's a huge amount of content on the internet about it - any problem you run into has been asked before and Google will answer. But...all other languages have their positives and negatives too.

Also, the IDE (Visual Studio) is amazing, even the free version. However, since you're a student, look here: https://www.dreamspark.com/

Choose your C#/other language book and work through it chapter by chapter. Don't try to rote learn anything IMO, as that will make you give up faster than anything. Instead, work through practice programs, referencing the book exactly where necessary (i.e. every word of every line initially). Soon enough it will start to sink in, and seemingly without effort you will learn to code.

Stick to console applications initially. Then when you are ready, move onto GUI applications, and then beyond (you will have a good enough understanding of what is possible by this point that you can decide for yourself where you want to expand into next).

With each project you set yourself, decide on something you can't quite do. Maybe create a program which requires arrays when you have never used arrays before. It'll make you learn arrays, that's for sure! Keep settings yourself projects you can't yet do, and you'll quickly improve.

Yes, it takes dedication. A lot of dedication, but soon enough you'll be somewhere. It worked for me at any rate. I now code in C++ writing really big projects.

Good luck!

Richard

Thank you for being so thorough. How long did it take you??

Posted from TSR Mobile

Hmmmmm. Well, it of course depends on how good you are when you define success, and how much practice you put in!

I've been coding since I was 14, and now I'm just under 18. I'm certainly by no means a rival to more experienced coders, but I could knock almost anything up (database project, simple 3D game, library, etc. etc.) and regularly write 20,000+ line coding projects. OK, so this is very small by comparison to many projects, but I am a sole coder, a 1 man team as the cliche goes.

It's really hard to guess how it will work out for you, but perhaps small but useful projects starting to emerge in 6 months to a year as long as you realise that these are only simple 1 function helper programs, not change the world type programs???

From that point on you should be able to make whatever you want, you just learn whatever you need to in order to make it a reality.

Very impressive stuff. I remember a while back that I made a four paned web browser using Visual Basic. That was a very long time ago and it's a real shame that I didn't progress further afterwards.

No point in starting now.