LEARNING PROGRAMMING FOR BEGINNERS

learning programming for beginners

If you are a beginner and want to learn to program, there is a very essential question right at the beginning: which programming language should you learn first? In this tutorial, we will briefly introduce the different programming languages and give some guidance on which one is best for beginners to learn to program.

WHICH PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES DO I NEED TO LEARN AS A BEGINNER?

The most common programming languages for beginners who want to learn to program for the first time are C, C++, and Java. C belongs to the imperative languages, while the other programming languages mentioned belong to the genre of object-oriented languages.

The good news is that these 3 programming languages are syntactically relatively similar so that once you have mastered one of these languages, you can learn to program the others relatively quickly.

PROGRAMMING PARADIGM: SHOULD A BEGINNER LEARN IMPERATIVE OR OBJECT-ORIENTED LANGUAGES FIRST?

Imperative programming is what a novice programmer might think of when learning to program: a program is a sequence of commands that tell the computer what to do and in what order. So as a trivial example, a program to calculate the sum of two numbers would consist of 4 ordered instructions:
  1. Read the first summand from the user.
  2. Read the second summand from the user
  3. Calculate a sum of them
  4. Display the result on the screen
So, imperative programming is first of all quite intuitive from the point of view of understanding, especially with such simple examples. However, it becomes problematic if you want to solve more complex problems and create more extensive programs. Then the program code quickly becomes confusing and thus also more difficult to understand and thus difficult to maintain. Imagine, for example, a program like the one above, which does not consist of 4 instructions, but 10,000. Such a program would be very difficult for humans to keep track of and understand. The next step is to get to know object-oriented programming languages, but it requires some coding skills.

HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR CODING SKILLS

There are online and offline countless ways to learn web design, web development, and programming. Therefore, the following suggestions are only examples and subjective recommendations. Take them as a starting point to explore the possibilities yourself and find the best way for you.

Books

Nowadays there is an almost unmanageable number of reference books about all kinds of programming languages. The quality is usually quite good, even if the approach varies. Some programming books are just too dry for me.

Nevertheless, reference books usually offer a very comprehensive and well-structured way to learn to program. And you can quickly look up things, which I did all the time, especially at the beginning.

Tutorials

On the Internet, you can find countless tutorials and step-by-step instructions for every conceivable programming language.


Videos

On YouTube, you can also find many videos with instructions and tips for programming. Just search for videos on a specific programming language, then you will usually find them quickly.

Online courses

Of course, there are also special online courses. These are often better prepared than many tutorials, more up-to-date, and are aimed primarily at beginners. They use eLearning translation tools so you’ll be able to understand them in your native language as well. Some of them are free, but for others, you have to pay.

Forums

In special forums you can ask questions and describe problems and usually get help quite fast. But you can also talk about problems and of course, help others.

Events

Special events for programmers make it possible to program over a weekend with other like-minded people and to learn a lot this way.

So, have you started programming?

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