Tools that taught me to code
I’m not an advanced developer by any means (in fact, my title is “Junior Developer”). But I think I’m in a good position to look back and see what helped me reach this level, and share some of the more useful tools for anyone looking to get started building websites and apps.
A note on teaching yourself. My development experience has been largely self-taught, meaning, I sat down by myself and toyed with this stuff for hours, googling around for answers, following tutorials, and just hitting Run over 9000 times until the program did what I wanted it to. THIS IS SO IMPORTANT. The best way for me to learn was to plug my nose and jump into the deep end, keeping my eyes painfully open for keywords. Learn how to use Google, learn to always click on the StackOverFlow answer, read alot, try alot, take breaks, but keep at it.
The human element. Find peers and learn from them. If you put all this time in on your own, you will improve by leaps and bounds every time you meet with other real-life developers. Ask them what tools they learned from, what text-editor they use (Sublime!), and what language they’d recommend getting into (necessary? growing? niche?). After months of programming on my own, I ran into a like-minded developer on a train, and just talking about it with him was a huge leap for my experience.
Read on the internet! This is advice for any career. Google it and absorb it! If you are interested in any topic and know nothing about it but are ready to dive in, read the whole wikipedia article. It will be so good for to have at least that level of background, even if you don’t know what it is all referring to. You’ll piece it together as you go, and have a great foundation for growth.
Now, to the tools.
- Codecademy is a free tool for anyone getting started in programming, anyone curious about whether or not they'd like it, or anyone looking to quickly dive into a new language. As with any programming, if you're starting from scratch, it can be slow moving early on (WATCH YOUR SYNTAX). But Codecademy works hard to pick you up from nothing and teach you some useful skills quickly. They now have weeks worth of courses for HTML/CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, Ruby, and Python. (Also, the whole experience is a great example of Gamification, which is slowly but surely taking over the internet.) Check out Codecademy. Even Mayor Bloomberg is doing it.
- I mentioned Udemy last week. It's a great tool for finding quality courses that will teach you pretty much anything. Not free, but sometimes paying a little bit of money for something will motivate you to actually do it. Like college.
- TheNewBoston is where I originally learned what an HTML tag was, and how to apply a CSS property to it. I didn't build anything pretty, but sometimes you just need the very basics, delivered exactly as that.
- Getting over the Objective-C and Xcode hill was a big climb, and I remember when every Google search was turning up a certain EXTREMELY helpful website. RayWenderlich and his team (the men, the myths, the legends) are the best place to go for iPhone and iPad programming. They have very simple, well-explained, source-code-providing tutorials for everything from very basic apps to simple games to the latest iOS6 features. I've also bought their iOS5 and iOS6 By Tutorials books and vouch for both of them. P.S. I was just on his site, and the latest slew of posts look amazing. I wish there was more time in the day.