Now comes the time when all the dreaming, planning, and nervous excitement come to an end. A new wave of wonder and confusion begins. I sit down at my laptop, slightly leaning and hunched over. Open my web browser and ask myself "where do I begin?".
The goal is clear. I want to be a code Ninja, swiftly flying through lines of text almost like I could do it with my eyes cosed. The path to get there is a little bit hazier. What platform will I develop for? What programming language will I use? What resources are approachable and educational? Lots of questions that I do not yet know the answer to.
The best advice that I have seen so far is, "Stop trying to figure out what you should do and just start." So that's what I'm going to do. Sure It's going to a little rough not having any direction, or clear instruction on what to do. I just have this nagging feeling that if I don't start now I never will.
I'm starting with the Javascript language which seems to be suitable for a first-timer.A programming language is essentially the way that we as humans communicate with the software of a computer.Each language has it's strengths and weaknesses. There is no one language to rule them all. From my understanding Javascript is very good for web development.
Codeacademy.com is my initial weapon of choice for the early learning experience. I began by jumping into the "Getting Started with Programming" course in the Javascript track. It's simple enough at first. Basically the course shows you what code to input, you follow through, and some sort of output will appear on the screen. I breezed through the first few sections with ease. The real challenge comes when conditional statements are introduced.
My first roadblock came when learning about if statements. An if statement will execute code depending on if the statement is true, for example;
This code will only display "I am wrong" since 1 is not greater than 10. If I entered a number greater than 10, the console would display "I am right". This may seem confusing at first, but it makes more sense as you spend time with it.
My main struggle right now is learning, and remembering the syntax. Syntax is basically the grammar of a programming language. If your grammar isn't correct, your code won't run correctly. I often forgot to close parentheses, and left out semicolons at the end of a statement. These are common errors and can be easy to correct if you pay attention to detail.
A great thing that Codeacademy includes is a syntax checker that will warn you when your code has errors.
This makes it a lot more manageable to troubleshoot bad code, and fix it. Also, they have a Q&A forum for every section which is accessible from a link at the bottom of the page.
So far I've finished a few courses on javascript, and I can honestly say that it's been fun so far. Every exercise has been fascinating and at times confusing. There's still a whole lot to learn and put into practice. It's not like I'm suddenly making cat GIF websites, and selling iPhone apps. This is going to take some serious long-term effort, but it's going to be totally worth it.Â
