I have re-started my adventures in computer programming. I’ve worked on the business and user experience side of tech projects for 5 years, though I’ve never learned to program. I’ve had a couple of stops and starts over the past year or so. I’ve been working on acquiring basic HTML and CSS skills, and that’s been fairly easy to pick up. Now with MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses such as those on Coursera) and wonderful online services like Codecademy and Skillcrush, anyone can learn just about anything online and for free. This is particularly true for people like me who want to learn how to program.
After writing a review of a book about Python (a program language that is touted as bring especially friendly due to its plain-speaking syntax) by No Starch Press, I became interested in learning this powerful, yet approachable, programming language. I signed up for a Python program with Coursera. I really enjoyed the lectures, but when it came to completing the assignments, I couldn’t keep up. The lectures and resources from the course are fantastic but they move from one topic to the other much too quickly for me.
As any programmer will tell you, coding is a contact sport. You actually have to do it, not just read and hear about it, in order to really understand it. I needed to learn at a slower pace than what was possible with Coursera. I’m a beginner and this new learning adventure is tough for me. I need to take one step at a time at my own pace. The basics in any subject are important, and this is especially true for programming. If you don’t understand the basics, you literally can’t understand anything beyond the basics. It’s a brick-by-brick process. You need the foundation to be steady and stable before you can build your programming house. There’s no bs’ing it in programming. Either you can write code that returns the results you want, or you can’t. (There are certainly plenty of open source resources to copy from, but even with those you have to know what you’re looking for in order to find something that’s of value to you.)
I went back to my old standby, Codecademy, where I started learning basic HTML and CSS, and to my delight they have added Python and Ruby (another language I would like to learn) to their offering. Codecademy is just what I need. Practical, straight-forward exercises that give bite-size pieces of new knowledge that I can acquire at my own pace. Additionally, they have added a groups functionality to the site so users can join different groups based upon their interests and levels of experience in different programming languages.
I feel good about the decision to leave Coursera for later work and focus on getting through the Codecademy curriculum. As I did 6 years ago when I decided I wanted to learn how to write well, I’m making a commitment to do at least one small Codecademy lesson every day and periodically I’ll share what I’m learning with all of you. (Maybe some of you fearless souls would lIke to join me? If so, ping me!) A daily commitment did wonders for my writing and I now make a portion of my living from it. Why not do the same thing for programming? Copy, paste, success.
Christa Avampato 