The most skilled in their profession are the ones who enjoy learning more and more about their art/skill. Coding is a fast-growing discipline. It has become a necessity and is taught in many colleges. Coding also gives good job assurance. But still, many students feel discouraged that they will never be experts at any coding language. Learning any coding language with the right guidance can make anyone expert in it.
And for you, we have some things that you can do to learn to program a make yourself a best coder from scratch.
- You can learn the language through a teacher or professor or any online platforms. These days thousands of videos are available for free with excellent video and content quality. Just search the programming language, you want to learn like c programming for beginners. Alternatively, you can read books that are best and prescribed for that language.
- Use the Feynman Technique; it is a common and easy technique in the measures to learn coding from scratch and becoming an expert. It says that teaching improves skills in that particular subject. For example, teaching C programming to your friends will improve your knowledge since while teaching your brain, eyes, ears, mouth, and hands are concentrated at a single thing. It is a good way to check and improve knowledge and concepts. This ‘teach and learn’ cycle should be on a repeat as knowledge is never-ending. Not only your knowledge but even your confidence will be boosted.
- Practicing makes a man perfect: It’s is a cliche line but still true. Joining platforms like HackerEarth, HackerRank, CodeChef, etc, and solving new challenges daily will tune your mind to the art of problem-solving skills. After a good amount of practice, you yourself will notice, that your brain itself provides a solution to any coding problem. Taking part in competitions and hackathons or contributing codes on GitHub will be a morale booster. If you have reached an intermediate level, then try doing internships related to that coding language. This is will help you in becoming the best coder.
- Review your code: Writing codes is similar to writing your school exam essay. You have to review it again and again so that the program can be modified for less space and greater speed. Also writing style like indentation will improve the look of the code, making it easier to debug. Other programmers can also understand the code easily this way.
- Think of different solutions: To further improve coding skills, one should have the ability to imagine every possible technique and solution available for a particular program. Always try to improvise multiple code solutions further. Coding in groups, where a part of the problem is solved by you and some part by others can be helpful. There is no defined coding trick, they are developed from practice. Like, the coding professors mostly will tell you the exact place where the student has done the mistake without reviewing the whole code. This is because they know what the common mistakes are made by the students. And they check that part only. And different people have different writing styles and mistakes. But with time professor has gained the art of reading the coder’s mind.
- Never Stop Learning: While it is good to praise and pamper yourself, it is even a better practice to remind yourself that knowledge is free and needs to be attained more. Never stop learning because knowledge is never enough. Try to attend as many workshops possible or learning through online courses from Udemy, Coursera, etc. There are multiple courses for a topic say if you search c programming for beginners. You will find a lot of content from top tutors to new once. Both have their own unique ways to show you how the work is done.
- Last but not the least, a good programmer tries to pass all test cases but expert/professional ties to find a test case for which his program will fail. Finding a test case for which your code gives an error or wrong output is healthy if once found necessary changes can be done to the code to make it more general.
These were some steps to learn coding from scratch to become an expert. My personal advice is to start with one language master the basics and then solve some problems. After this go for languages that are advanced. Most common one is C and I think learning C/C++ is still necessary.