this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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Asklemmy
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I'm a hobbyist programmer myself. I've picked up a few languages along the way, and by far the best approach I have found to learning is a simple but real practical use case. Find the smallest task you want your program to do, break it down into even smaller subsections, and then start to figure out how to transform it into code. It usually takes less code and knowledge about a language than you think.
A few years back I got really into Python for a few months as a complete newbie. One day, when I felt ready, I told myself I would put all the python skills I picked up and build a small program that would generate random, solvable sudoko puzzles. After a few weeks trying everything and not getting anywhere, I gave up programming.
Moral of the story is I probably that I should have taken it a bit slower I guess
To be fair, I'm a decent programmer: I spend a significant portion of my workdays programming all kinds of things. Writing a program to generate sudoku's with a unique solution, without copy pasting a bunch of algorithms, but actually making it all up yourself definitely sounds non-trivial to me.
(Read: That sounds like a really hard beginner project, and you should be proud for even trying, and you shouldn't give up :) )
this is exactly how I started. I looked at my job to see what I can do to solve an issue we were having using python and, even though my final script was a complete mess, it worked. learned SO much along the way
Here’s another quick tip to get anyone started: Find some code written by someone else, and modify it.
Depending on the language, you might be able to just read what it says and experiment with what happens when you change some details here and there. If the code does something that you’re interested in, you’ll also have the motivation to spend a few hours tweaking the code, or even reading the documentation.
Also, nowadays you can ask GPT what different parts of the code does. You can drill down with follow up questions until you understand how a specific detail works in the language you’re working with.