#codeyear

[andrewkkirk]

Why I'm Learning to Code?

Over the last few years, I've attempted to jump into computer programming. My intentions were genuine, but my efforts were misguided; without a strong course of learning to follow, I usually lost interest after several weeks. I tried auditing a college course (2009), reading a beginner's guide textbook (2010), and taking a Harvard CS class online (2011), all to no avail. 

For these reasons, I was excited when late last year, Codeacemdy, the online platform to teach programming, made such a splash when it launched Code Year. The idea of the project was to inspire those without programming skills to spend the year completing weekly lessons in order to become a novice programmer. While I've tried other means to learn computer programming, Code Year, really struck a cord with me. 

As an online marketer, I have always understood at a basic level, how the web works. In fact, back in middle school I created the most basic of basic (pre-CSS, pre-JavaScript) HTML websites for a school book report project, hosting it via AOL's personal web page platform. However, I never expanded on this experience to learn more. Working as an online marketer, increasing my understanding of web development increases my ability to execute marketing initiatives. For example, currently I have to rely on a webmaster to insert Google Analytics code snippet into a website on which I wish to track online web goals. Also, I'd like to be able to easily customize the look, feel, and user interaction of Face The Buzz site without having to pay someone else. But, my desire to learn goes beyond these special cases. 

Beyond these one-off instances, I want to possess a greater understanding of the web ecosystem at large. I want to understand how web applications and users interact, how web programs can interact with other programs, how data is stored and interacted with, and many other complex concepts that I am probably not yet aware of. Web applications are becoming entire economical ecosystems. Facebook, while complex and valued at nearly $1B, is on the most fundamental level a single web application. And Facebook isn't an isolated example. There are increasingly entire products that live within a single web application. This trend will continue and it will become increasingly important to have an understanding of the web system that's spawned these industries. If I want to play and work in this system, I know that I'll need to have a strong understanding of how the system works.

Quipol

[adityalesmana-blog]

Learning MS Access?

I always got impression that MS Access is not a 'real' database like MySQL and Postgre or even MongoDB. Surprisingly many businesses put that in the requirements for applying candidates. 

Maybe I should learn MS Access so I do not appear to be too technical. 

After all, being technical people in a typical Singapore Inc. do not earn much and yet need to deal with so much shit.

[areliaontheweb]

I still have a list of things to do for the reunion website, but tonight I decided to get started learning JavaScript with CodeYear. There's several weeks of catching up ahead of me!

[lifeandcode]

Scratch in 30 Seconds

Scratch is a visual drag n' drop programming environment aimed at kids but great for teaching novices of any age programming concepts (plus ya can make cool stuffs with it)

[techerous]

Crazy how much support this idea has garnered. I’ve been using it myself to brush up on some programming since it’s been a while since I actually took classes for it and to translate concepts over to javascript which I had never used. So far it’s been a great refresher for me, but I can’t see it being easy for someone going in with no prior programming experience. Anyone out there trying this out with no experience? What do you think of it so far?

[lifeandcode]

Feeling dejected and scared that my enjoyable dive into coding was about to turn into a nightmare, I considered quitting. Who was I kidding? I’m a consumer, not a creator, right? Luckily, I’m bad at knowing when to quit, and I vowed to stick to my goal of learning what this whole world of computer programming was all about.

"A N00b's Journey Into Coding," Ryan Levick.  Worth the read if you want to know what it's like to try learning to program from scratch. 

[lifeandcode]

Test Drive: Lifehacker Night School's Learn To Code

Latoya Peterson of the Online News Association  test drives Lifehacker Night School's Learn to Code:  

This is actually a really good way to test to see if you have an aptitude for coding. If the Lifehacker session was a breeze, and you finished it within an hour, congratulations! However, if you’re like me, your mistakes and problems will run up the total time investment to close to four hours. I feel a bit better about the basics of coding after I finished, though not completely clear, and I don’t remember half of the concepts they just explained. (What the heck is var, again?) Still, it is a useful reference and fairly easy to follow, so I give it a solid B+.

Want to learn to code? Looking for the right entry point for you?  Check out the 100+ free and freely available learn-to-code resources in the Life and Code Resource Guide.  

[lifeandcode]

Review: Larry Ullman's PHP for the Web: A Beginner's Beginner Guide

Want to find a beginner's guide to programming that really works for beginners?  I know there's more than one -- but here's one that I know from firsthand experience really works. 

Review: Larry Ullman's PHP for the Web

It can be difficult for novices to find the right starting point when they want to learn to code.   Many "beginner" books are in fact "for people who are beginners at THIS programming language" not for "people who are beginners at ANY programming language."  

It can be pretty discouraging to pick up a "beginner" book only to realize you don't understand a word of it, no?

Before this book, I pushed my way through a number of others, and about half the time I was typing on blind faith -- I didn't always understand what I was typing; I just typed in the hopes that it would eventually become clear.  

Sometimes it did.  Sometimes it didn't.  I learned some stuff from those books, but I wouldn't describe it as an ideal pedagogical experience. 

I can say without reservation that Larry Ullman's PHP for the Web is a beginner's beginner book -- it goes through basic programming concepts cleanly and simply, chapters build upon one another, and it doesn't depend on the reader to already have experiences with concepts like "object oriented programming" or Model-View-Controller.  It's simple, straight-ahead code that demonstrates the basics, like loops, putting stuff in a database and getting it back out, pattern matching with regular expressions, and more.  

As another measure of the book's quality, all the example code actually worked (you'd be surprised how often the example code you can download with many books doesn't actually work.  If you're a beginner, you're likely to think the problem is between chair and keyboard even on the rare occasions that it isn't). 

Another problem with beginner books is this: if they're not baffling you with decidedly un-beginner material, they drop you off far short of where you'd like to be, namely, making cool stuff and putting it on the interwebs.  At the end of this book, I could actually put simple useful stuff on the web with the things I learned in this book. Nonetheless, I don't really want to stop there.  The good news is that this book is part of a series of three books of graduating levels of difficulty.  I already own the next book in the series, PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Websites, and I'll be moving on to that next.