The two biggest mistakes I've made in learning programming

A year ago, I had just graduated from college and decided to step into society. I have a lot of initial ideas and want to make them happen, but I don't know how to program.

Following the advice of Yipit co-founder Vin vacant, I began to learn to program myself.

Now I finally learned enough knowledge to achieve their own product prototype, along the way, very bumpy. If you are on the same road as me, I hope you will avoid making the same mistakes as me.

Error 1: I spend too much time learning about things that I don't really need

There are so many technologies and so many conflicting views that it's hard for you to judge what's important and I don't know how to start. After reading a whole bunch of the most popular articles on hacker News, Quora, stack overflow, I was going crazy. Here's a hodgepodge list:

HTML, CSS, AJAX, PHP, Javascript, Heroku, celery, SQL, jQuery, Django, POSTGRES, Nodejs, Backbonejs, Ruby, Rails, MongoDB, PYT Hon

In these techniques, I don't know what I need to learn and what I don't need to learn, so I try to learn it all over again.

I should have done it: I should have shrunk the list and just picked out the technology I needed to build the prototype.

In the end, I figured out what these technologies were all about, and then reduced the list to the following:

0. HTML: Constructs the content of a Web page (such as links, headings, and other elements of the selection)

1. CSS: The style of the content (such as changing its color when the mouse moves over the link)

2. Javascript: Make content dynamic (such as when a user clicks on a link to pop a menu)

3. JQuery: A JavaScript library that contains easy to use plug-ins (such as slide effects show pictures)

4. Python: Process data (such as reading a user's purchase record from a database or recommending a product that a user might prefer)

5. Django: A Web framework written in Python can be used to concatenate the above techniques. and provides a lot of built-in, very necessary functions. Using frames (such as user login and easy access to any database in Python) can make your work much simpler.

Suneel Chakravorty

Error 2: I didn't immediately start writing code

I spend too much time reading the programming books. I'm not sure that the things I read are directly helpful to my project. To make things worse, I did not apply the contents of the book and finally found no effect.

I should have done it: At first I should have been learning from a few small projects. I later found a very effective way to learn:

0. Actively write routines after reading a few tutorials.

1. Pick a few simple projects and then code to implement it. such as a simple blog, or a voting application.

2. Repeat the second step many times.

3. Build your initial project prototype.

There are many benefits to doing this, and you can quickly overcome any fear of programming. You will see the fruits of your labor. Most importantly, you can quickly develop the technology needed to build your product.

Suneel Chakravorty Compiling: Bole Online-@ base Saint OMG