Start small, but think big. Your project should involve skills you currently have in your toolbox, but you should also have a plan for future features and skills you’d need to turn that vision into reality. Without applying your coding skills in a few projects, you wouldn’t even be considered for professional coding gigs—so start planning and practicing. (Our advice? Use your coding chops to build an amazing setup for game night.)
Take a few minutes (or a day) to think about the reasons—the real reasons—why you want to learn a programming language. Be honest with yourself. Are you trying to learn the barest minimum to score a promotion? Are you looking to make a big career change? Do you want to create the next greatest app? Thrill your roommates by programming your various smart devices to do something awesome?
Based out of New Zealand, Code Avengers provides fun and interactive programming lessons for kids 5 to 14; for schoolteachers wanting to teach coding; for people going into coding professionally; and for creators ages 15 and up. Also offered are one- to three-day "code camps" for students up to 17. These day camps are located in multiple states -- and foreign countries.
No matter how many certificates and coding workshops you complete, or how many programming languages you learn, the proof of your coding skills will be in your programming project. While your personal project doesn’t have to be as ambitious as creating the next Google Maps, it should be something you’d want to work on 24/7 to constantly improve and expand its scope.
The programming community is full of people who are willing to help the next generation of programmers. GitHub, the online hangout for developers who use Git to manage their coding projects, is designed for online collaboration. Not only do developers host and share their projects with their peers, they also provide code feedback and general advice to the community.
Created in 2006 by educator Salman Khan, Khan Academy is one of the original free online-learning institutions. With step-by-step video tutorials, you can learn how to program drawings, animations and games using JavaScript and ProcessingJS, or learn how to create webpages with HTML and CSS. See, especially, Khan's "Hour of Code," designed to introduce students to one hour of computer science and computer programming.
Founded in 2010, Udemy is an online learning platform that can be used as a way to improve or learn job skills. While there are courses you have to pay for, there are plenty of free programming courses, which are taught via video lessons, such as Programming for Entrepreneurs -- teaching Django- the #1 Python Frameworks, APIs, HTML, CSS, + Payments.
That's a great list, Kevin. However, nearly all above-mentioned course/tutorial providers provide content for nearly all programming languages/frameworks. Hence a newbie learner would be confused which learning platform to choose out of the lot. For ex. if one is interested in learning Python, all the above-mentioned platforms provide Python courses/tutorials. To solve this dilemma, Hackr.io (https://hackr.io) is the programming community where learners can find the best online programming courses and tutorials recommended by the community. PS: Sorry for the self-promotion ( Am Hackr co-founder) but I thought of informing the readers about the possible solution.
When you reverse-engineer someone else’s code, testing each line to see how it works, you get a better understanding of the big picture. Thanks to the tons and tons of open-source code that’s out there, you can learn just about anything by examining someone else’s (flawless) work. Just remember to share your code back with the community if inspiration strikes and you improve a part of the program you were fiddling with.
Also, something that I've found is that if you go wrong somewhere instead of mindlessly searching for the error (assuming there are multiple or you don't know the error's location) just start from the beginning and go down seeing that if this works. If you see a break and something disconnects, in all probability that's where the error is. It's all logic.