this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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How do I go about this? Are there any free resources that’ll help me get started?

I see people advising to start with a small project, but you need to get some basics down right? What language? How to develop it and stuff?

My only experience is some very basic C programming classes I took during school.

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[–] Passerby6497 16 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Realistically, you should still find a project that you want to do and use that as the basis of your learning, as that will influence your language of choice,. I'd start with either python or powershell stuff to get going, as both are general purpose, multiplatform languages that can do a lot and are moderately forgiving with syntax and stuff.

Past that, find a project that interests you, break down what needs done, and learn those steps individually. It's not as cohesive as a hand holding hello world style tutorial, but I found I learned so much better if I had a need for the knowledge instead of just learning for it's own sake.

In my case, I picked powershell as I'm a windows admin. Since I'm a data hoarder as well, I chose a video conversion pipeline to convert all of my movies into a consistent file format. Part of the requirements are to find all files with an extension that isn't my standard (concepts: file listing, filtering, working with objects) and then execute an external program to convert the files (concepts: command line execution, state management, error handling, looping), validate the conversion completed successfully (concepts: reading file content, filtering/regex), moving the files to a new location or replacing the file with the new one and backing up the original (concepts: file management), and log file retention and cleanup. As I developed my script, I also began learning to properly "function-ize" my code to make things more readable/usable, and eventually started moving functions into a module to better modularize my code.

A decade later and I'm currently in the middle of a couple of projects using powershell to make and call API functions to automate business services at work.

[–] amldvk 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Wow, thank you for the detailed response. I do have ideas for what kind of stuff to work on, especially after your great example. Thank you again!

[–] Passerby6497 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You're welcome! Coding has been my passion since I was in high school, and I understand how hard it can be to wrap your head around the concepts, even with formal schooling on the topic. To the point that I've learned so much more on my own than I did in school just because my passion allowed me to internalize the knowledge instead of just learning it.

Best of luck on your adventure!

[–] amldvk 3 points 4 days ago

I remember a time in my life, back when I was trying to learn C. Every time I saw a problem my brain directly started breaking it down in to steps. How to solve this consistently, think about edge cases, etc.

I want to get that back!

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