How to learn programming

Most programmers "learn" programming by consuming the patterns learned by others. Few learn by practicing. This is usually done by spending countless hours practicing programming with many case studies watched. This practice, however, produces poor results, perhaps because you aren’t getting an adequate set of examples.

Practicing

For instance, a group of college students was let loose on a 3D card game after they spent a lifetime practicing programming. Although they solved some of the basic rules of the game, a successful game was hard to achieve.

A similar situation played out for music fans who have spent countless hours practicing: online, in the program, or wherever they thought the composers and performers were conducting. Without non-musicians, it is hard to listen to an orchestra playing music, however, they’ve worked their way through practicing it very imperfectly.

Learned patterns happen to be familiar patterns whereas learning to program through practice is the process of creating new programming patterns. This means that through learning patterns, you’re able to accomplish task-specific goals, for example, to help with a complex math problem or program the machine to play a complex game by selecting a mathematical hypothesis and later preparing the program (because programming involves solving many problems, it will need to be prepared and has to fit in order).

Programming through practice, however, can be intensively boring and take a lot of time. It does produce better results, however, since you’re spending your time observing codes and machines the same way that programmers do, albeit on a much smaller scale.

If learning a combination of programming algorithms and years of practice gives you better results and faster response times than reading case studies or the scripts and notebooks of your friend’s or family’s programmers, that should suggest that the best way to become a better programmer is to learn how to code with experimentation.

Programming with trial and error, therefore, is better because you are experiencing it for the first time and making the mistake as often as you’re able to, doing everything you know to do wrong and being able to replace the lost files easily. This is the part of coding where you are truly creative, it is where you are equipped to create new work from a scrap of paper and your lack of experience.

Programming through practice can also be addictive. This is why on my second novel, I took a novel that was described by both the publisher and its head writer as a “bleak and unfashionable reflection of an opaque America” and chose to write it as my first couple of lines. This strategy was in my desire to transform the narrative into a story that was not my usual setup. This novel is finally published at the end of October 2018.

Reading case studies and the scripts

Reading case studies and the scripts of my friend’s programmers and best friend’s classmates’ professors who had trained their own daughters to be good programmers was also part of my technique. I relied on experiences learned from other people as well, to switch my thoughts to better answer common questions and answer better for myself. Because the writing process was more similar to doing research, which is another problem we used to have.

Experiments

So in essence, my experience regarding how the better programmer does in programming is that it is by experimenting and seeing how we come up with new algorithms. I might have a problem that has more possibilities than I am aware of, and I think of new thoughts. When I put it all together, however, I come up with new formulas that allow me to manipulate the shape of a mathematical problem and solve it like a computer.

That’s why it’s common for me to come up with solutions in programming, without knowing what the problem is or what I am writing to solve. During the brainstorming process, I take the ideas of others and improvise on them, thus, perfecting my method of problem-solving. I always ask, “How do I solve this problem.” This technique is pretty common among my colleagues as well, although only in the coding work environment! We do it purposefully and diligently. I’ve learned from my mistakes because I consider the various scenarios I’ve put myself in. I solved most of the time, therefore, now I take those methods and ideas and use them in the coding, and I hardly ever make a mistake because I wasn’t always experimenting with my formulas. Now that I’m done studying my screen, I program by thinking about how the code will be executed and calculating the success rate of program settings.

People often tell me that they don’t learn programming through experimenting, but it’s like a learning process that you have to attempt over and over, as most of the case studies and research were started through improvisation, practice, trial, and error, then interacting with others and then they write a case study for each year.