When and Why to Learn to Program

Another business guy turned programmer here. It's good to see that there are more of us out there and that I'm not the only crazy one. Some advice I would give to anybody who wants to learn to code from scratch:<p>- Focus. Don't do it on the side, it would take too long. Treat learning to code as if it was your regular job(I tried to do 40-60hrs per week, I did about 2000hrs of coding in my first year)<p>- Don't hurry. Don't obsess about efficiency and how you use your time. You will waste tons of time on stupid bugs and knowledge you don't really need, that's just part of the learning process. Focus on putting in those hours week after week and you will see results.<p>- Work on a project. The only way to truely understand how things work is to actually use them. Don't hide yourself behind books, try to apply everything you learn asap.<p>- Give yourself permission to suck. This is really hard if you're older (I was 30 when I started to code). If you already have a career, you're not accustomed to be utterly clueless anymore. I had already forgotten how slow and painful it is to learn something from scratch. So give yourself a break and judge yourself the same way you would judge a stranger. Don't expect to become stellar in a matter of months just because you're smart. Hint: so is everybody else who is coding for a living.

This was great to read - I'm the same age as you and changed majors away from CS about 10 years ago because of similar reasons to what you described. Being young and not knowing much about the world meant that I didn't have any passion for what I was building, and after getting some real life experiences under my belt, I've come back to learn programming again because, well, I just can't help myself.<p>I've thought about trying to learn programming again for the past few years, but gave up on the idea by telling myself it was too late and that I could never really succeed without a structured learning environment. But once I started looking into it, I'm dumbfounded by the amount of resources out there that not having access to knowledge is simply not a valid excuse. These massive open online courses out there are revolutionary and having just finished one, I felt much more passionate, thirsty, and focused than I ever was as an undergraduate.<p>And to echo the point in your article, what has kept me learning is a project I want to build. Learning backwards by figuring out what I want to do then researching how to do it works great for me. But, what's been challenging is staying grounded to the task of building the product rather than letting my mind wander off into a daydreamy state of wondering how I'm going to manage/promote/monetize the product once it's finished. Baby steps...

This is very good advice: "My opinion is that if you're fortunate to have friends that know how to program then you should learn to program in the language they're best in."

Couldn't agree more - you absolutely need an idea that you are passionate about enough to turn into a project, loads of drive, and long chunks of time to yourself.<p>I taught myself the basics of rails in about 2 months using Lynda.com because after numerous failed attempts I realised I would struggle to get anything off the ground - mostly because it is extremely difficult to transfer passion to another party.<p>I tried what I believed was a good idea with my one and only developer friend, but he just didn't have the drive that I did, and months slipped by with little or no progress (I gave him 50% share of the company, I wasn't paying him - a mistake with hindsight).<p>The challenge was I couldn't outsource the build on Elance (etc) because I had no idea what to ask for - and mocked up screenshots simply don't portray a vision of where you see your product going, and I didn't have the technical nous to judge whether I would be getting good value for money.<p>After "learning" Rails my first creation is still going strong, it's a free site but one that has taught me so much and I'm super proud of it.<p>Moving forward my basic skills in Rails can mostly get me to MVP for testing my second project, and if it's successful I'll source a developer for short projects via Elance until I can afford a full time dev.<p>So in a nutshell, you either have to be completely cashed up, or you have to get your hands dirty to MVP status by cutting code, even if you consider yourself primarily a biz dev guy like I do. I prefer the latter solution - it's just too difficult for me to predict everything you need to build until you start building.

I recommend any new programmer interested in developing web applications or an internet startup should learn JavaScript first. Here is a blog post on How to Learn JavaScript Properly: <a href="http://javascriptissexy.com/how-to-learn-javascript-properly/" rel="nofollow">http://javascriptissexy.com/how-to-learn-javascript-properly...</a>

What about the suggestion to learn Ruby? I've been trying to decide which language to start on... I thought JavaScript, since I know nothing about Ruby on Rails.<p>I definitely also have a project in mind, but I don't know where to start aside from the HTML and CSS I've learned.

I'm of the belief that while not everyone may be able to code in a way that contributes to their startup's codebase, knowing the <i>point</i> and <i>power</i> of programming can vastly help the direction you pour your resources in.<p>For example, understanding how loops and iterative tasks work will help you understand why changing the text on one specific product page (out of a 1000) isn't as easy as popping open the text-editor and changing that page's text. It helps you figure out a sensible data-model on the back-end (so that your frustrated coder isn't writing a special if-statement that breaks on the next iteration of the site)

The rivers of nonsense questions coming into stackoverflow from well meaning people who are not able to describe the difference between a variable and a browser and who don't have the capabilities to care unless it solves their immediate problem at hand leads me to believe that not everyone should program. in fact, many people who do program should be politely asked not to.<p>Stackoverflow needs a "entrence barrier" test where if you can't communicate or have no ability to think rationally about the words being typed there to solve problems, your question goes to the "dumb" section of the site.<p>point is, stop encouraging everyone to be programmers. You're slowing progress by doing so.<p>we've got 4.4 million questions, 90% of it from novices that should be asked not to program. you can go take a look at them, they are little better than "how is babby formed" type questions. These people are trying to program when they should be told that it's too hard.

Good article about finding out how to get motivated to learn something, but this has very little to do with coding aside from the context of the goal.<p>Aside from that, stuff like:<p>"Here's why I finally learned to code: I've been a web entrepreneur since I was eleven years old — for over sixteen years now..."<p>Makes me discount just about everything that was written. I just have a bitter taste left over from this massive ego leak.