How have you learned programming?

Hello Community, i think it would be really interesting For me and i’m sure for other People From This Forum, to know how you have Learn Programming?. it means if you Read some Books, or watching some Code Tutorials?

My Way:

Well, at this moment i’m really just a beginner, but i’m learn from Videos, and also From my Germany Friend Justin. and soon in my Summer Holidays i will Read a Book about CSS and HTML For Beginners, i’m really looking Forward to it :blush:

Have a nice and :sunny: Sunday :slight_smile:

Simon

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Basically by creating/coding things I had no idea about how they really work, doing some tutorials which were way to heavy for me, and googling all the errors which came up on the road. Still today, googling questions and reading answers in the internet (and many many different sources) is – almost – my only way of learning new things.

I’ve never read any books or something like that – for me, that never made sense, since I always wanted to stay to the medium I’m working with and starting coding too fast for most of the books out there. But of course this is just my personal way/opinion.

More the trial and error principle, but that worked out quite well :slight_smile:

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I learned it, by doing it…


…and making more mistakes and errors than one can afford :stuck_out_tongue:

(still learning every day…)

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Some of the ways I’ve learned programming:

  • Looking through language documentation (lately, using devdocs.io)
  • Looking through language specifications (mostly for HTML and CSS)
  • Blog posts, with a preference for in-depth explanations or explorations (never really cared about tutorials or demos).
  • Books, mostly for JavaScript (a first foray with “DOM Scripting” many years ago, and a few years ago with “Speaking JavaScript”).
  • Trying stuff just for fun.
  • Answering people’s questions (which kind of requires that you do some research if you want to give a good answer).
  • Teaching (same thing: you have to do your research).
  • On the job: trying to answer project needs at work, but also following my curiosity.
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I first learned to code from this Neopets HTML tutorial when I was a kid. I’m surprised it’s still online!

I continued to learn good HTML and CSS practices from the awesome, tight-knit community at OSWD, which was sadly abandoned by the owner and the community fell apart around 2006-2007. Those folks were amazingly kind. They taught me not to embed text in images, and showed me how to accomplish complex layouts without tables. :cookie:

My introduction to “real” programming was through WordPress, as I tweaked existing themes and Googled to my heart’s content. I made personal websites and learned the basics of PHP through WordPress themeing.

I taught myself PHP through trial and error and lots of trips to php.net. I would find scripts from http://hotscripts.com for something I wanted to build (a calendar, or a message board, for example) and take it apart and put it back together and poke around to see what was going on under the hood.

I learned JavaScript much the same way: first by approaching jQuery and all the awesome-looking tutorials it could do. Then, once I was familiar with jQuery, diving under the surface to understand JavaScript itself.

The popular, bloated, messy frameworks out there might be looked down upon especially in the Kirby community, but they are the gateway drug for many. And now I’m so far down the rabbit hole that I just watched an entire conference talk about the <a> element.

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When I started, there were no Videos I could watch, I started copying code samples from computer magazines. But to be honest, I didn’t understand a lot.

I really started to understand programming when I started schooling as a technical assistent for informatic. I learned classic programming using C - later we looked at databases and stuff like that.

Before I started schooling I educated myself in using Linux and the Bash. I read a looooot of Books and Articles. I started building my own websites in 1998 so I knew html. It all came together when I was at that school. I quickly started using PHP, which I mainly learned from books.

Everything I learned (and still learn) was always a trial and error process. I wanted something to work in a certain way, so I tried around until it did. Today, with more knowledge I do have more of a plan :wink: I think today it’s a lot easier, because there are so many tutorials out there.

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The best source, for learning programming is :view source

:slight_smile:

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I was doing some amateurish design work (flyer, stickers, etc.) for bands when I was in the civilian service and one day one of those bands asked me to do a website for them. I had lots of “totally legal software” on my computer and one of those programs was DreamWeaver — I think version 3 or 4. I only knew that it was about making websites and I thought it can’t be that different from Photoshop and so I said yes and got started with DreamWeaver’s visual editor.

I managed to achieve quite a lot with it without even knowing anything about HTML and CSS and was asked to do more and more websites. But at some point I ran into lots of issues and didn’t know how to fix them, because the visual editor was just too limited. So somehow DreamWeaver forced me to actually learn HTML and CSS. That was my gateway drug, when I realized that it’s actually not that hard.

My starting point for PHP was really weird though. I was doing an internship at a German office of an international NGO before university. One part of the job was to overhaul their website. When the new site launched the international bureau contacted me and asked if I could help them with their website as well. They had just hired an agency from New York to build a custom CMS for them and that took such a huge budget that they weren’t able to afford paying the agency for maintenance afterwards.

The CMS was written in PHP and connected to a MySQL database and I had no idea what that meant. But with my ridiculous pre-student/self-taught hourly rates they just told me that they would pay me for three months if I would be willing to learn PHP and MySQL to help them afterwards. In hindsight it was a super fucked up deal, but of course at that time it meant a lot of money for me and it was a fantastic opportunity.

I was scared as hell when I looked at the code for the first time. I didn’t understand a tiny bit. I bought a book about how to build a joke database with PHP and MySQL and together with all kinds of online resources I just tried to find my way through the system. I think it took about a month until I started to partially understand what was going on there, but from there on it just clicked and I had my mind blown about all the options I had with PHP. I started building my own CMS afterwards, which was absolutely horrible, but it taught me so much and I never stopped from there.

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This reminds me of a time when I made a website for a doctor’s office using Microsoft Word and Save As > Web Page. It looked great!

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Thanks a lot @bastianallgeier !! and a Big Thanks to the other users of course :smiley:, To Read your way how you have Found to Programming, That is very inspiring and gives me courage!.

For my Feature i will give my Best of course That is Clear :v: