As computers become more omnipresent in our lives, coding knowledge is becoming more and more in demand. With enough programming knowledge you can create your own website, build your own app, develop your own software and even engineer your own hardware. If you’re considering learning to code from scratch, here are the steps you should take.
Choose your language
First you will need to choose your programming language. Different languages are better suited to different applications – for example C++ is good for creating games, Java is good for mobile apps and PHP is specific for web programming. Some languages such as Python are more versatile. Most programmers learn multiple languages – once you know one, the others come more naturally as they rely of the same basic principles.
Take a course
Self-teaching yourself code is possible, although you’ll probably still want a few tips and pointers. Books, blogs, video tutorials and online training courses can be good for learning at home. If you work better with other people, a coding workshop or a short course may be more suitable. You can even hire private tuition.
Experiment
Once you’ve got to grips with the basics, it’s time to start experimenting. From here you can start to build your own code and better understand how to enable certain functions. Use open-source software to research other codes that people have discovered and shared. Try writing your own basic processes from scratch. Soon you will be able to start a full project of your own.
Build your own program
Eventually you will be ready to build your own program. You should start with something basic and work your way up to building a professional program – one that you may or may not wish to commercially sell.
Building something complex may require assembling a team, largely because it will be time-consuming and allocating tasks could speed up the whole process. Before building a program, you should lay out a design document to follow. From here you can start developing until you have a working prototype. This prototype will then need to be tested for bugs. You can get friends and family to test it, or – if you are creating a commercial product – you can hire a test group of professionals and download a test management solution to record any bugs they find. Learning to deal with bugs is a frustrating but essential part of programming.
Eventually, once you have ironed out bugs, you will have a fully-working computer program, which you can try and sell or use as a personal project to put in a portfolio.
Getting paid to code
There are all kinds of avenues you can take from here. You can develop your own software based on your own idea, work freelance turning other people’s ideas into realities or work for a software development company following set projects and a set wage. There are all kinds of areas that you can specify in from web design to PPC marketing to video games development to mobile app development to business software development to creating digital security and protecting against hacks. The world is your oyster.
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