Guide to Programming Series: Week 1
Posted by 
November 30, 2007 •
What do I need?
If you’re all set to take up programming make sure you have a healthy dose of the following quantities:
Motivation:Â No one can do anything by remaining on the couch watching television. If you have the willingness to merely open up Notepad and start punching in some codes even if it just displays a Hello World message then you’ve cleared obstacle one.
Desire:Â Somewhat akin to motivation but it follows a different philosophy. If you have the desire to create (and this applies to creating anything), then absorbing what you need to learn is a piece of cake. A desire to learn means a desire for self-embetterment which will allow you to strive further than necessary and reap all and more.
Curiosity: If necessary is the mother of invention then curiosity is the mother of discovery. Experiment to sate your curiosity and continue the learning process even after you’ve finished this programming series. Learn to appreciate the joy of discovery. And as long as you’re having fun, learning will never be a chore.
Imagination: While programming requires skill, visualizing your project and how it will go is all about imagination. An average programmer with lots of imagination always creates more interesting and useful programs than a great programmer with no imagination at all.
Technical skills like math, proofreading and the like come secondary to what I’ve mentioned because those latter can be searched and learned via the internet but the latter qualities are acquired and developed over time. While learning to program seems an impossible task, it is, as I’ve stated repeatedly, relatively simple.
At the end of the day, you soon may find yourself enjoying the idea of making a program (a video game perhaps? Maybe not but a game for mobiles probably) more exciting than actually using it. Experience makes development twice as fun.
Tags: Programming Series
Enrolling a few courses is a great way to learn the basics. from there you can start practicing and improving the way you code. I learned from doing small programs to focus on various topics and reading different books. I always do one or two small programs a week just for practice, trying out the new things I’ve read. i also learn faster when someone is teaching it to me directly rather than reading it from books.
A Guide to programming! I hope to read more on this series. I am also conjuring up some tutorials on my website but it will be on web development.
Don’t worry. Personal experience is much better than those being read on books.
Cool new series sylv3rblade! The introduction was sweet and very informative. I’ve been looking into going deeper with programming but sometimes it’s just hard because of the lack of time. Plus like you said, there are already lots of classes and free softwares that you can find in the internet.
Anyway, I’ll be looking forward to more of your programming tips. Hoping that I could get several tips and improve on my programming skills.
@Mark
Everyone has his own “thing” when it comes to learning but newbies tend to get whatever they can get their hands on so this series (as of the moment) is targeted at them.
@Teejay and McBilly
Thanks XD. I’ve already laid out my uhh.. Lesson plan for the next few weeks. Hope you enjoy them.
yes and what i just said is what I did. I’m not suggesting that they do the same thing. Anyway, keep it up. I’ll keep on reading.