How to Start Programming - Complete Guide

Key Takeaways

[Music] if you were just getting started with programming then chances are you're overwhelmed by the number of videos courses articles languages frameworks and just overall content that you could potentially start with now getting started is better than not starting at all but you don't want to start with the wrong content and end up learning a bunch of stuff that you really don't need to know for your programming goals so in this video i'm going to give you a five-step guide that you can follow to start programming right now now this is meant to be a general enough guide that this will work for really any programming goals and what i mean by that is why do you want to start programming do you want to write basic scripts do you want to write bots that automate a website do you want to do game development what is it do you want to do and then what should you learn based on those specific goals there is not one size fits all you do have to do a bit of research but this guide should give you the steps that you can follow along with to understand where you should start programming and not be wondering if you're starting in the wrong spot now with that said i will mention that i myself do have a programming course it's called programming expert now this course is designed for people with no prior experience or who are beginner programmers to get to a software engineering level as fast as possible so it teaches programming fundamentals object-oriented programming advanced programming software engineering tools software design we have coding projects in there it's really meant to bring you to this level as fast as possible so if you're serious about programming and you do want to become a software engineer then check it out from the link in the description and you can use discount code tim to get a small discount at checkout now i will mention that this is not for everyone if you want to be a game developer for example if you're just doing this for a hobby maybe you want to just write some basic scripts maybe this course isn't for you and this actually leads me really nicely into step number one for this video which is to pick a topic now what i mean by this is that you need to really narrow down why it is you want to learn how to code and specifically what you want to learn how to code what do you want to make what do you want to do with code why are you learning this once you know that it's a lot easier to go and pick a language or an ide or the tools to download but you need to have that figured out first so what i'm going to do is list out a few topics and maybe reasons why you may want to learn how to code and then in the next section or the next step of this video i'll talk about some specific languages that you may want to learn based on those topics so for example you may be interested in mobile app development web development maybe you want to make bots maybe you want to scrape websites maybe you want to do some basic scripting you just want to write a tool for yourself maybe just want to have some fun you're just doing this as a hobby maybe you want to do machine learning and ai maybe you want to get into data science maybe you want to do game development maybe you don't care and you just want to be a software engineer and get paid six figures there's a bunch of different options here and again you really need to narrow down what this goal is and do some research and figure out the different areas of programming there's so many different fields that you could go in and i'm just barely scratching the surface here on what's possible and what you can do with programming but these are kind of the general disciplines and domains that you're going to be picking between and so do some research figure out what really interests you and what you'd like to start with you can always change later on but the language you're going to learn first is going to be the one that's based on what you're actually going to want to make right what you want to complete what you want to do with your coding knowledge so now we're moving on to step number two which is the most difficult and this is to pick a language now at this point you do have to understand why you want to learn how to code and generally what you want to make with code is it apps is it games is it just general scripting do you want to make bots once you have those answers then i can start recommending some languages for you to learn now i do want to kind of say here that this is tricky and a lot of times you'll start learning a language and realize it's not for you and switch over as a beginner that's completely fine and a lot of the stuff you learn in one programming language will directly translate into another programming language especially when we're talking about kind of just the basics and when you're just getting started it's really when you're getting into more specific stuff that you could say lose a lot of knowledge by learning something you don't need and then moving over to another programming language and having to relearn kind of the advanced and more specific stuff for that language hopefully that makes a bit of sense but i just want to stress here that it's not a huge deal if you pick the wrong language you can switch over especially if you do it in kind of a timely manner anyways the five most popular programming languages today and the ones you can't really go wrong learning are going to be python javascript java c plus plus and c sharp now i didn't list them in the specific order but those are the five most popular programming languages and if you learn any of those that is not going to be wasted knowledge or wasted time those are used at tons of different companies for tons of different projects and you can make almost anything with all of those different languages now each language does have its you know strengths kind of pros and cons but those are very general languages and you can use a lot of stuff and make a lot of stuff with it all right so now that i've gone through all of that what i want to do is go through all of the topics that i uh listed in step one and then talk to you about some specific languages you may want to learn for those topics now these are recommendations this does not mean these are the only languages that you can possibly use these are just kind of the industry standard and what i'm most familiar with so keep that in mind okay mobile app development you need to pick within mobile app development if you want to do ios or android there is a few languages that work for both but generally speaking if you're going to be a mobile app developer you're going to get paid you're going to do just ios or just android so for ios the language you're going to want to learn is swift now you also could learn objective c both of those work but swift is kind of the newer more modern one and what i would recommend now for android you can learn java or you can learn kotlin now both of these languages work for building android applications java is a lot more general so i'd probably recommend that but kotlin is more specific just for android applications so i have a look at both of those okay moving on we have web development now if you want to be a web developer you are going to need to know javascript now that's specifically if you want to work on the front end if you want to work on the back end you may consider checking out a language like python or like go now moving on we have bots in automation one of the best things to do for bots and automation would be python this is if you want to be like web scraping if you want to build a bot that buys sneakers for you you can do that really easily using a language like python continuing we have scripting now scripting is just writing kind of small scripts that aren't you know having a user interface or being a large application you can do this with really any programming language but for this i'm going to recommend python just because it's really easy to learn and generally good for scripting moving on we have machine learning and ai now for machine learning and ai i'm going to recommend python again although you could link learn a language like r sorry then move on to data science for data science you're going to have r and python as the main languages again there's some other ones you can learn this is just generally speaking and then lastly we have game development now for game development you're gonna learn c sharp or c plus plus depends on the type of game development that you're doing i would recommend you look into something called unity as well this is how you can make 3d games it's kind of a full-fledged ide that uses c-sharp as the main programming language so hopefully that gave you a decent kind of introduction to what you want may want to learn for each of these topics again you can get into specifics and some people will tell me oh i'm wrong you should learn this language for that this is generally speaking what you should learn now let's move on to step number three alright so at this point in time hopefully you have picked a topic you have picked a language and now you want to start writing some code however before you can do that you need to have somewhere to write your code and that is why step number three is to download an ide or a code editor now an ide is an integrated development environment this is just a more feature rich program or piece of software you're going to install on your computer a code editor is kind of more bare bones piece of software it doesn't really matter as a beginner which one you download but i just wanted to differentiate you have ides and you have code editors the line is kind of blurred on which is which but you'll see when you're looking around something says ide something says editor that's kind of the main difference one just has more features than the other anyways for this step right here what you download is going to depend on what programming language you want to work in however generally speaking vs code is the ide that i'm going to recommend to you this is completely free i'll leave a link to it in the description and fun fact i actually worked on vs code when i worked at microsoft anyways vs code works for almost every single programming language very general a lot of people use this so that's what i'll recommend however there is a ton of other options and if you're working in something like unity or c-sharp then you're going to download unity now if you want to be a game developer unity is its own ide its own i guess platform you could call it for making 3d games and so you're going to download that if you're working in java there's a ton of other options that may be a little bit better than vs code if you're making android applications there's an ide called android studio if you're making ios applications there's an ide called xcode so you can kind of just go on google and search best ide for enter programming language best code editor for enter programming language now if you want a few kind of lighter weight versions here uh or i guess code editors as opposed to ides because all the ones i've mentioned have been ide so far then you can check out sublime text personally that's my favorite i use that in a bunch of videos you have notepad plus plus you have adam and then you have vim i'll let you guys kind of browse through those and you can see what features they all have but generally those will work for most programming languages as well it's only if you're doing something really specific like game development or mobile app development that you're probably going to pick a specific ide like the ones that i mentioned so at this point in time you have picked a topic picked a language and downloaded an ide or editor now it is time to actually write code with step number four which is to learn the basics now i'm going to tell you how i would learn the basics and what basics to learn first of all if you're learning python you can go and look at programming expert even if you don't buy programming expert it gives you kind of all of the piece of curriculum that you may want to follow along to learn however for other programming languages the basics and what you should learn are going to be very similar so i'll give you all of those topics and list them out i do want to mention though that i highly recommend for beginners and people that are kind of new to programming that they start by watching at least one video now this could be like a 30 or 45 minute long video that gives you an introduction to a specific programming language shows you how to set up your environment shows you how to run code you're going to save a ton of time especially as a complete beginner by watching someone who's an expert or at least very experienced in a language go through and kind of give you all the tips and insight that they've learned over the years now once you've got through that you can learn stuff in whatever way you want but for the very very start like when you're writing a hello world program if you've never done this before save yourself some time and just watch a video even if it's only 20 minutes long you don't have to go and watch something that's like six or seven hours on an entire language but watch at least the basics and beginning part again because that's going to save you a ton of time and hopefully give you a bunch of tips and insight you wouldn't have figured out until much later however once you've done that you can then learn the following topics in this order in whatever way you see fit so these topics are first program output and running code so you need to know how to output something to the console and you need to know how to run your code that is the first thing you should learn next you should learn about variables then you should learn about program input so how does the user actually give some input to the program and maybe how does it dynamically respond to that next you're going to want to learn about math and arithmetic so how do you add numbers subtract numbers divide multiply exponents kind of the basic operations in a programming language then you're going to want to learn about conditions so conditions are like checking if two variables have the same value for example or if the user typed in something that matches with this string you get the point next we have if else and else if otherwise known as control flow so how do i execute a block of code based on some condition occurring that's what i'm talking about there then you're going to want to learn looping so for loops while loops how do i iterate over something and repeatedly do something multiple times then you're going to want to learn about errors and exceptions so how do i handle an error in my code what happens if i do something wrong what does an error message look like how do i read an error message that stuff is important and well you probably are going to figure that out earlier as well but specifically i would focus on that at this point then you're going to want to learn about things like arrays and lists you may also want to learn about maps and dictionaries and sets kind of different data structures ways of storing multiple pieces of information that's what this kind of subsection is about and then lastly i would learn about functions now there's a ton of stuff in between all of these topics that you're going to have to learn but generally those are the basics of any programming language and once you learn that stuff and you understand conceptually how it works you can go and very easily pick that up in another programming language that's why i was stressing at the beginning you know even if you pick the wrong programming language at least for the start of that all your knowledge pretty much is going to translate into another one the only thing that's going to change is the exact syntax so the way you write the code as opposed to conceptually what's going to happen and kind of what it's doing anyways that was step number four again i highly recommend that you watch some kind of video tutorial when you're just getting started i have video tutorials on go c plus plus python javascript java bunch of other languages so maybe check my channel if you want to find those and with that said let's go to step number five all right so my last step here is going to be a short one and this is to work on a project so if you're at the point where you have learned the basics of a programming language you know all of those topics that i listed before and you kind of have a general competence or a general sense of how to write code you want to immediately get into some type of project now this does not have to be huge doesn't have to be overwhelming you can work on something very small but you want to apply your skills into a project and make that a habit as you're learning how to code because the best way to get better is to do something yourself and actually work on something where you can apply all of your skills in one place now an example of a few projects that are really beginner friendly and should work in any programming language would be something like a choose your own adventure game so you can ask the user you know do you want to go left or right do you pick up the axe or the sword whatever you get the point let's choose your own adventure game uh you could do something like a quiz game so maybe you have a 10 question quiz you ask the user uh you know a bunch of questions and then you calculate the score at the end give them like what percentage they had that utilizes a fair amount of the things i talked about before you could do something like a contact list so maybe write a program that allows you to store a bunch of users contacts and kind of search for users something like that and if you want some project ideas you could check out programming expert we have a few free ones on there that you can have a look at and of course if you purchased it then you would be able to see the full walkthrough on how to complete that project so that said i am going to start wrapping up the video here this was a difficult video to make because i wanted to make it general enough that it works for everyone but specific enough that i could actually give you some actionable advice and things to go do so hopefully i struck that balance all right i will mention here that if you stuck around to the end you get a little bonus let me turn on my other camera here i just got a new cat recently her name is sophie and she's chilling right here so there you go i also have another cat if you guys watch the channel her name is fresca don't worry fresca is still around we've just gotten a new addition to the family here called sophie so welcome her to the channel leave a comment down below hopefully you guys enjoyed the video if you did like subscribe and i will see you in another one [Music] 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