To new students who have just entered the program

The university has passed two years, looking back at two years of college life, and occasionally still quite frustrated. Failed to make a shot of the results, in the brewing for a year after entering the Internet front-end industry, gradually found the direction. I also often think, what kind of university is meaningful? What is the plan to gain an edge in the future? How to spend the university again. Your future life is difficult, precisely not because you failed to enter a satisfactory school, but in this school, in a can let oneself free and full growth of gold four years, abandoned himself! Pushing yourself hard is not an occasional, it should be the norm. Write this article, is because oneself also in a confused period, really have a kind of helpless feeling. The lazy way of life in summer vacation, but also abandoned their own plans before. This article is considered to be a plan for yourself. It is also a suggestion to the technical staff who are destined to see this article. Of course, the effort is a reminder to all the young people who want to achieve their career. Wasted youth, in the next few decades, there will always be some time to deeply regret the fallen self.

In this article, I want to talk about programming with the students who are going to study programming at the university, because you may need some advice to step into this new phase. My sophomore year, experience is still shallow, there are mistakes, welcome to point out, thank you!

Programming is a very interesting thing, learning to program is like being a magician, you can create anything you want to create. In the 20 years that I was born, there was nothing more appealing than programming to me, except for literature. As Zed Shaw says, " programming as an intellectual activity is the only form of art that allows you to create interactive art." You can create projects for others to use, and you can communicate with users indirectly. There is no other form of art that can do such a degree of interactivity. The film leads the audience in one Direction and painting is not moving. The code, however, is two-way interactive. "

Some confusion

But when you start contacting a computer-related course at your university, you will find that the so-called programming learning is nothing more than a teacher teaching a chapter that asks you to use the grammar you learned to solve some math problems. So many people choose to give up, think programming boring boring, with a long lesson learning, but can only write simple arithmetic, or solve math problems.

This is not all programming, however, because it is a vivid indication that the programming language is just a tool that you can use to solve math problems, and to do other interesting and useful programs.

In (my) university, the computer-related courses teach C + +. Once, a junior friend of mine asked me, "I studied C for a while, why do I still feel useless?" "I answered him in such a way:

You've been studying C for a while, and it's not your personal problem, I can't explain why, but what I can tell you is that Linus Torvalds wrote Linux and Git in C. Antirez wrote the database Redis in C. You may not even know what Git is, how do you write this level of program in C?

So, when you go into a puzzle period after you learn a C + + foundation, don't stop because you can't write a practical program, and you should start contacting other programming languages. When you learn and do things more and more, you will slowly find that programming language is just a tool, it is important to do what you want to do, in what language appropriate to do (Hua soft in-school game live streaming site SISE Game is an example, the site's backend is written with Ruby on Rails, but live chat is node. JS (JavaScript) because node. JS is more suitable for processing WebSocket than Ruby). The reason you feel that C + + is useless is because you don't have the vision and the ability to use it to create.

What should I learn? My advice is a rigorous, strong-type language (like Java) and a pleasant scripting language (such as JavaScript, Ruby, Python). Of course, if you want to learn some immediate skills, you can also write the front end (HTML, CSS).

So, how?

I'm not going to discuss how to learn, I just want to list some useful suggestions:

0. No matter what you want to learn, the first article you read should be "the wisdom of asking questions."

1. Information related to Google search technology

2. Buy a paid and reliable scientific Internet service, and don't skimp on the money for a meal.

3. Don't be afraid of English, English is very important.

Almost all the latest technologies are available in English only when they come out, and most of the quality Tutorial are in English.

4. Participate in a number of high-quality communities and focus on people who deserve attention.

This is important. What the school teaches is old and outdated (though it may not be the school's fault), you have to keep in touch with the community and learn new techniques. AngularJS release has been 6 years, but in our school is still teaching ExtJS, many students even graduated to find a job, even AngularJS have not heard of.

Domestic V2ex and foreign hackernews are good communities.

Some status

You can't expect college or college teachers to bring you anything, it's all on your own. No matter how good or bad a school is, the school itself can influence you in a supportive, not conclusive, way. In my school, almost all play games and the exam, as far as I know, even the key universities, such students are also a few, I gradually understand that " your future life is difficult, it is not because you failed to enter a satisfactory school, but in this school, in a can let oneself free and full growth of gold in four years and deserted himself "(the answer to the copper).

Paving the road for the future

If you are interested in programming in the future, you should know that when looking for a job and other competitors to open the gap, not where you graduate from, in school as a cadre, but you have enough ability, and can clearly let others see your ability.

The way to see your ability is open source community and blog, so I suggest you in the process of learning to contribute to open source, and even to maintain an open source project. In addition, you can take your own records and summarize it into a separate blog. A good Github account and a good indie blog are the best resumes. Maybe you can only have time to do these two things in the four years of Free university.

To new students who have just entered the program