If you have been starting to write code and study code for a year, you are still learning to code. You have not learned to code, you are not even a journeyman yet.

I've been in the industry about 9 years, and coding since I was a child. My parents caught me staying up late with a flashlight under the covers as a teenager reading books on C instead of nudie mags. My first program with an event-driven UI ran on a NeXT Color Station. This is not to brag, it's to say I've been doing this basically since I could decide what to do, and I still have a lot to learn about coding, computer science and software engineering.

So you've made your third biggest mistake; you've vastly underestimated what you are in for. You have never "learned" to program, you are "learning." Every year will ask you to acquire new skills and use new models and learn new domains.

I think the problem is a lot of people jump in, start coding and then never go back and learn about the nuances of a language.

Case in point was myself when I was learning Javascript. Sure, I could get the JS to do what I wanted, but it was clunky, used a lot of memory and was slow. Fast forward a few years and I've gone back and read Crockford's books several times, and with more studying, I've gotten much better at writing JS. I now try and make my JS as lean and as fast as possible. It's a totally different approach then when I started.

The problem is thinking once you know how to do something, you're done. Like a friend once told me, "You don't learn to be a programmer, you learn to be a student of the language you choose."

I don't know that #1 was a mistake. When getting into any new field, it is very hard to tell what is important and what isn't, what is a solution to the problem and what isn't. If you are in school, sure they'll guide you, but if you are self-learning, there is no really good filter. So learn about everything. Take a breadth-first approach. Some of the specifics you learn will be wrong, useless, or otherwise inappropriate. However, getting an understanding as to why they aren't relevant is in fact learning the field.

The more information about a topic you have in your head, the more likely you are to see the connections between subfields, how various bits are important and unique or just ho-hum standard implementations.

I regularly see people in some niche area say "look we have found this amazing new way to handle the data-flood", only to tell them they have reinvented NoSQL or a message queue, or a technique for dealing with matrices that the image processing or simulation folks have been doing for years (and all of them poorly, making recognizable mistakes). A breadth-first overview has much advantage.

Step 1 in learning to code:

10 PRINT "COCKS"

20 GOTO 10

Step 2 in learning to code:

10 INPUT "How many cocks do you want",C

20 FOR I = 1 TO C

30 PRINT "8===========D"

40 NEXT I

I'm not recommending that your first steps into programming be in BASIC, or involve cocks. (On both accounts I would recommend the exact inverse.) But this is how a million programmers got started: useless programs that amused us. Never, ever, ever underestimate a useless program, especially for beginners. The author of this article seemed to want to focus on building a prototype for his Web startup. And that's fine, as a long-term goal. But if you're brand new to the world of programming it's probably a good idea to start with the basics, like printing or drawing stuff on the screen, doing some simple (or, later mor complicated) mathematics, or munging or transforming data in interesting ways. This helps keep the budding programmer focused on the patterns and "shape" of their language, which knowledge they can then later direct to a specific purpose like Web or smartphone apps.

Congrats on learning to code but the biggest mistakes new hackers are making is diving right into learning a specific lang.

Learning programming fundamentals is a better way to go. That way, you can jump from lang to lang.

Starting is hard so congrats again.

Best quote in the article:

    There are so many benefits to jumping right in. 
    You’ll quickly get over any fear you may have of programming. 
    You’ll start seeing the fruits of your labor right away.

I disagree slightly, as I don't think that following that path of reading instead of jumping in is inherently worse.

Just jumping into writing code is great for motivational reasons because you'll have something tangible, something to be proud about and to help you get excited and keep learning. But you'll still lack insight in a lot of the surrounding environment, things that any programmer should know.

Attempting to do this the other way, reading as much as possible and as in depth as possible, will be good to give you some insight, but you'll have nothing to show for it until you start coding and it'll still take time for you to learn some stuff that can only really be understood with practice.

What I'm trying to get at is that it doesn't really matter how you start, as you are going to have to dedicate 10,000 hours to learn, polish and excel at any craft.

Well, you need to know what is out there, and what is possible. So at least skim over some of the technologies. You could waste a lot of time if you didn't know say, Sass, existed.

There's also a timing problem. If you invest now, and learn technology T, then when you are in the middle of developing a project, the marginal cost of using T is very low. But if you are up to your neck in a project, and then need to take a week off to learn T, you are not likely to do so.

Personally, when re-starting my tech career I wish I had learned Java (or any JVM language) over PHP, PostgreSQL over MySQL, and Dojo over JQuery.

Great insight. Every time someone says, "I want to learn to code." They should have a project/task in mind and just go. The stack that Suneel lays out is a good foundation for web dev, but as he admits, he like many others invested more time than was necessary in books/documentation/tutorials.

More people need to just jump in. If you get to a point that you want a feature from jQuery, look it up and implement it, but don't feel like you need to wrap your mind around every feature before you can begin. Great work and keep at it.

I've had a completely different experience. The first few times I tried to write code, I learned only what I needed to know for the specific app. I hated it. It seemed like I was just learning a bunch of random syntax and beating them into shape.

Later, I actually tried the textbook first approach, and this worked much better for me. By learning the framework and being able to observe the patterns, learning new commands was much easier and I could often guess at exactly what I'd need to do. I also remembered commands for much longer than I did with the first approach.

YMMV, but some people have more theory-centric learning styles and some have more application-centric. Test and figure out what works for you.

I wonder if the advent of web programming makes this process all the more confusing?

When I took basic Java and VB programming courses in college 10 years ago, we focused only on Java and VB. There was no HTML, CSS, JS, frameworks, etc. And you could have a complete, functioning program with GUI from the start.

Now, to create a web app, you have to learn all those other things in addition to Ruby, or Python, or PHP. As you advance in skills you'll likely move to either front-end or back-end, but when you start out creating everything from scratch, it feels like there's so much more.

(This coming from someone who did IT work for the 10 years following college, and is not trying to break into the web developing world).

Ask a developer who is working in the area that you are interested in to give you some guidance. My girlfriend decided to become a web designer. Do she asked an experienced developer, me. I said HTML, CSS, JavaScript and JQuery. She added Photoshop and some image creation tools. She learned the parts I suggested and decided to go to a community college to get some focus. (Actually, she originally signed up to get the student discounts on the software.) In a few months she will get a job to get some practical experience. Then she will tackle her own projects.

This pretty much applies for any endeavor ; not just learning to code. Thanks for the post.

2 Biggest mistakes when learning to [TASK X]

Mistake #1: I spent too much time learning things that I didn’t actually need.

Mistake #2: I didn’t start [TASK X] right away.

YMMV But I typically do #1 when learning / starting anything I don't know about. That is I some proportional amount of time googling/wiki reading/pinging friends for all the info/standards/tools/libs around subject. Review* them for worth, spend more time with ones that pass.

It is very helpful to have a idea of the breadth of and resource for a subject.

Review typically means "experimental coding". The 2nd point "start coding now" is a Truism. Just don't start coding "production". Learn some, think, first.

As much it pains me to admit it, Nikes' "Just Do It" applies here (and in life) as the author has learned. The procrastination and anxiety that comes with tackling something new can be overwhelming. The task oriented approach narrows focus and makes you think about what you need to learn. Fear is also a great motivator especially when your lead is breathing down your neck with a 'JGID - just get it done' attitude. :)

suneel, many people make this mistake. I went almost EXACTLY the same route you did. Although, I had already known HTML, CSS, and some Javascript, I was wildly unprepared for what I would encounter next just to learn how to get a working prototype. It basically took me 8 months before I got something running on Heroku. I went through four different Django books with some success here and there, including the Django Project's simple Poll tutorial three times without grasping it. Little to my understanding, all of it made sense once I used the book written by one of the creators of Django himself. I also used a lot of StackOverflow and the guys hanging out in #Python and #Django Freenode IRC channels were awesome!!!

The trial and error got me to learn a lot of things. In addition to the six things that you've listed, I forced myself to learn VIM as well. You probably use VirtualEnv, which you've forgotten to list.

Anyway, it's always good to see others going down the same road and sharing their experiences. Do you have some links to some of your early projects?

Totally agree. Prototyping is all you need to test out a startup idea. And if you learn by doing, everything you learn is useful!

It's easy to worry about every details and learn every piece of tech yourself all at once, but it's a recipe for unstable foundations and disasters of distraction.

Creating small achievements by prototyping simple ideas in unfamiliar technologies gives me small, concrete rewards to celebrate the journey.

Knuth hath said: "A person who is more than casually interested in computers should be well schooled in machine language, since it is a fundamental part of a computer."

I agree with that sentiment. The whole "focus on what works" is not the same thing as "understanding what the hell you're doing."

I think you can reduce the list a lot more--and should. I'd choose a single language and learn it well and go from there. And I'd only work the command line features. So Ruby on the command line or JS or Java would be my choices (but only one).

This is actually just 1 mistake.

Start writing code, make it do what you need it to do today. This will focus your efforts to what you need to do at the present moment and you won't end up trying to figure out how to deploy an app you haven't built yet.

They say you learn best through experience.

I learned CakePHP by coding my thesis with it. Now, I wanted to learn python + postgres by planning to port my thesis to it.

Everyone out there who wants to learn to code, stop reading these comments and use the time to just go learn!

Yeah, away with all that crap, just use Django already! Good decision.

keep blogging suneel....maybe this will finally get me to start learning!

This goes hand-in-hand with people writing lots of code (especially when first starting out) and not reading much.

There seems to be a huge lack of people simply reading code to learn from it, rather than poring through dozens of recommended "Learn to Program in X in 7 Days!". A novelist probably reads more than they write; the same is rarely the case for programers (at least in my experience, especially in the case of people who are less pedantic than others).

You make some valid points.

However, had you not taken the road you did, the material you read much later on probably wouldn't have made much sense and probably could have made you turn away from it all right at the start, right?

You get excited when you see results right away. Once you do enough things that begin to make you wonder, "Gee, there's gotta be a way to do this faster or more efficiently." When your curiosity drives you to search for answers is when you delve much deeper into the nuances and the grit of a language that becomes important for scale.

Well put. I've been programming professionally for 8 years (and as a student for another 8 years prior--HP48G RPN represent!). And to this day, I find myself regularly attracted to articles, books, and blog posts about "basic" lower-division CS topics: principles of object-oriented design, language design, patterns, compilers, etc. It's the same old stuff, but reading it is more enriching and insightful the more real-world programming experience you have.

I agree that learning the nuances of languages is important, but to demand this aspect of learning to someone who is just beginning to code is actually harmful in my opinion.

As students of computer science, we have strong tendency to learn things bottom-up. We take care in learning the fundamentals before applying theories in real work. This is not a bad thing. Better quality codes are shipped and become more maintanable.

But for someone who is just starting out, the bottom-up approach becomes an insurmountable obstacle. As a result, many give up too soon and never end up enjoying the joy of creating real working applications.

Look back to when we first started to code. I wrote some bad BASIC code in high school abusing GOTO and GOSUB everywhere I could. I knew nothing about programming language paradigms or memeory management, but I had a lot of fun coding without reading any book on CS.

I disagree. You didn't learn to talk by studying rhetoric. You imitated sounds and words that people made around you. Then you started being able to express your own ideas. Then, maybe, you learned how to say things well.

It's the same with computers. While some people may enjoy learning deductively about abstractions like algorithms and paradigms, studies have shown that most people learn inductively, by having something they want to do and figuring out what to do.

I disagree (at least that this is universal). If you start with just fundamentals but no specific language, you can't whip up anything to play with. The amount I was able to learn easily without doing anything was quite low, so I'd say start with a language with a responsive interactive shell so that you can quickly see what things do for yourself, and (crucially) see what happens when you make small changes to whatever examples you might be looking at.

But there's a bit of this I agree with: don't get focused on just one language. Once you can get basic stuff done in one language, it's worth learning how to do stuff in a different language. For me, the second language was almost as hard as the first, but after that it got a lot easier.

(Which is not to say that I don't think fundamentals are important: I'd suggest eventually hitting the core algorithms, data structures, computer architecture stuff—even if it doesn't seem immediately relevant—as well as playing around with more out-there stuff (Prolog was always a favorite of mine). But I don't think all that's going to be interesting at first to someone who's just getting started out of a practical, "I want to build something", not a "I want to learn all of this!", motivation.)

Agree.

Learning the fundamentals doesn't mean not doing actual programming at the same time. You have to code to have a better understanding on the fundamentals.

My personal experience is that after many years of programming, the fundamentals I learned in school still help me get better. There were many such moments that you were digging into some interesting technical topic and you suddenly realized that some fundamentals had another layer of meaning or application you didn't know or I didn't fully understand before.

Also, understanding different types of programming languages, like OOP, FP, logic programming, declarative programming, etc. help improving one's programming skills, no matter what programming you primarily use at work.

Agreed. I am largely self taught as well, and have found a lot of value in reading texts on CS / programming fundamentals :

  * Computer Architecture
  * Operating Systems
  * Algorithms
  * Data Structures
  * Database Fundamentals
  * etc.

In addition, more seminal-yet-not-directly-practical books such as SICP are quite valuable. I've been meaning to read TECS (a copy of which is staring at me as we speak), however I have not had the time to devote to its projects yet.

Edited to add :

In addition, reading up on web application architecture was quite helpful. This is increasingly important as modern frameworks may otherwise abstract away concepts to the point of making them very black-boxy.

That said, my goal was not to rush towards an MVP or prototype. I intend to be a competent developer first, and a founder second. If these were reversed, I might well have adopted the OP's approach instead.

I agree to an extent, but this shouldn't be construed to mean what I think is a bigger mistake that new programmers[1] make: bounce around from language to language when you're still trying to learn how to program. I made the same mistake when I was learning. The language is (largely) irrelevant, so by trying to learn Ruby when you've barely learned C (vice-versa, whatever), all you're doing is overloading yourself with syntax, when you should be focusing on nailing down the syntax of some language, (essentially) any language, so that you can begin to focus on learning how to program and not what the asterisk means in that context.

[1] Tagent: am I the only one who hates "code" as a verb and "coder" as a noun? It makes it sound so rote, and reminds me of "code monkey." I'll take programmer/developer/hacker/engineer.

I agree and disagree...

Learning the fundamentals is important, but one must put the theories in to practice by learning a language, writing some code, making mistakes, correcting them, and learning how the fundamentals work in practice.

We all have different ways of learning. When it comes to programming, learning the fundamentals first can save a lot of time and frustration. Not everyone can pick a language and start learning right away.

I think a better way to start is by learning the fundamentals like: - variable declarations - if statements - loops - functions

Those fundamentals are the same whether you're doing backend coding or frontend javascript.

Remember, it's all syntax.

That might or might not be ideal theoretically - but it requires an enormous amount of self discipline and persistence if your're on your own.

But I think all self-taught programmers (of which I am one) should set aside some time for the fundamentals once productive in one language.

I would talk a more organic approach. Jump right in and when you come upon some bigger subject matter (sorting algorithms for instance), take a break and go study the subject a bit..

I don't know why you were downvoted but there is definitely something to be said for what you argue.