ACTUALLY Learn to Code

Learning How To Code In Real Life

Learning how to code is a process, not just a fuckall massive dump of links. That said, I think it's a super-useful thing to have in your repertoire. I might be biased, as I actually do it as a major component of my job, but it's certainly handy, and in more ways than you'd think. I find myself using my text editor, a few line of code, and a smattering of regular expressions all the time to pull meaningful words out of walls of meaningless words like this here.

First: Why Code?

The reasons to code are myriad. From marketability and resume padding (the worst reasons) to making the machine overlords do your bidding (the raddest reason), it is incredibly rewarding, but also fucking maddening in the highest order. Nothing ever works, nobody will ever understand you, and the computers you love will become the bane of your sad, nerd existence. Every *ding*, error popup, segfault, log barf, etc. will be a fresh antagonism of you and what you stand for. When things are going well, code will be your friend, but most of the time it is a fickle mistress at best and a bitter enemy at worst (and most probable). If doing your taxes makes you want to pull your hair out, you might want to rethink programming. It's like arguing on Facebook with someone paradoxically more pedantic than your shitty friends. If you can pass the gom jabbar test of humanity, then continue on. You might just enjoy the masochistic endeavor of programming.

Loadout

There are religious wars over what a programmer needs to do their job, but this is my humble opinion. Programming is done best, I think, on a POSIX operating system. A lot of people like Linux because it's free, and I like it a lot myself. Not only that, but when you go to deploy code you'll possibly be doing it on a lot of computers at once, and accordingly you'll probably be deploying it on Linux (unless you want to plonk down crazy coke money on Windows for every machine). It makes it easier, I find, to develop in an environment that feels like the one you're deploying on. That said, Unix-type OSes tend to all work faiiiirly similarly. I develop on OSX because my job gives me a MacBook. Surprisingly, Apple makes great computers for both trust fund yuppies and real programmers. Strange bedfellows. For the rubber meets the road of development, you'll want a good, solid, feature-filled, and performant text editor. I prefer Sublime Text. It runs everywhere, it's fast as heck, and it can be had for free. It's nagware, though, and well worth the dosh if you really use it every day. It also has a package manager, Package Control ( https://packagecontrol.io /) that is crazy good.

GOOGLE

Google is your friend when you program. If you know how to solve a problem but things are going wrong, Google it. If you don't know how to solve a problem, Google it. The only thing you need to know to use it effectively is what strings of text are really important to your problem, so using Google effectively is a solution, a learned skill, and good eye training for what messages are of value. Most of your Googling will take you to...

Stack Overflow

This is the repository of all knowledge regarding programming fuckups. I make them, you'll make them, the entirety of your computer experience is essentially a sea of fuckups from the 80's under a sea of shitty patches from the 90's, with code snippets from Stack Overflow running on top and advice from Stack Overflow keeping the broke-ass snippets working together.

Languages

The next important thing to decide (after what you want to program; if you don't have that yet go back to square one, get out of here, save yourself, and wait until you have a problem worth solving) is what language to use. I won't waste your time with a million links to resources here, as, as frequent as not, finding the highest-rated thing on Amazon and piratd^purchasing it will give you better, more up-to-date info than I can. That said, I'll try to run down some pros and cons to languages to give you a good place to start deciding.

C/C++

The C-based languages are probably some of the most established that are still being used today. C makes up the foundation of nearly every OS, and its younger, cooler brother C++ introduces a load of features that, essentially, are the foundation of modern programming. One of the nice and, simultaneously, terrible things about it is that it's a "compiled" language. This means that, at the end of the day, you're left with a program that's translated directly into the language that the computer understands. This means that it's fast as hell; probably as fast as you can get without writing in assembly. We shall go not into assembly. If you're reading this, you're not insane enough for assembly yet. The problem here, though, is that it's really easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Things have gotten a lot better fairly recently, but I'd still recommend familiarizing yourself with C++ so you appreciate The Struggle, then moving on to something more expressive. If you go very far at all, invest in a good book on data structures and algorithms.

Perl

This is my language of choice, because I'm old and fat, I work on old and fat code, and my enjoyment is secondary to pulling down a paycheck. That said, it's actually pretty boss for a few reasons. It was one of the first languages that had a solid system of pre-packaged modules in a central repository (cpan: http://www.cpan.org/ ), it's actually pretty fast for an interpreted language. Unlike C/C++, it does NOT compile. There's a program that sits between your code and the CPU, translating your intent on the fly. This is slow, comparatively, but Perl folks like to say "computer cycles are cheap and human cycles are expensive". If performance is a huge deal, go for C++. If it's not, consider Perl. It's crazy easy to learn, and it still keeps you pretty close to thinking about things the way the computer does. If you get stuck, there's http://www.perlmonks.org/ It's like Stack Overflow if it was run off yr grandpa's BBS, but the people there have forgotten more than you'll ever learn.

Python

Python is an _amazing_ language to learn on. Even in production, it's pretty powerful, but for learning it's hard to beat. That said, it makes some weird choices. At the risk of people losing their shit, I don't like how they handle white space. Writing Python is like writing a paper. When you're not writing a paper, all that matters is what you say; your content. With a paper, style matters, and you lose points for indenting wrong, bad formatting, etc. Python is like that. If you don't keep your whitespace (tabs, spaces, etc. that separate code and code blocks visibly and, here, functionally) consistent, Python will lose its shit like this fellow. There's a style guide called PEP8 that code should really conform to, and Sublime has a plugin that can help you code to PEP8 as you go. Also, its package manager, pip, is either the most complete or one of the most complete package repositories in existence. If you want to solve a problem, someone else has probably already done it. Steal their work and use it how you need to. They want you to.

JavaScript

To hell with JavaScript. It's the only kid on the block that runs in the browser, and it's not the WORST language in the world (especially with ES6, the newer version that most browsers don't support fully), but you can't do fucking ANYTHING with it without layering modules on frameworks on other frameworks, and it's changing by the day. I'm trying to pick up Ember, and it's great, but I thought it was great yesterday and apparently it was shit yesterday. I guess it will be great tomorrow and what I think is great is shit today? Basically, fuck JavaScript. If you're doing web dev, you're stuck with it. The bastard. If you are, consider using a good framework like Ember which sucks or React which also sucks. If you're developing more traditional programs, ones that run largely outside the web browser, there's NodeJS, which takes the JavaScript engine from Chrome and separates it so it can fly free as a bird and run programs anywhere. It also has a boss package system, npm, which is crazy powerful but perhaps a little dense to understand when using to its full potential. Oh, and Node is changing all the time, too.

Also, fuck JavaScript.

Clojure

It's a neat language that runs on the JVM, or Java Virtual Machine. I don't know enough about Java to speak on it in syntactical detail here, but it has, probably, the broadest adoption in business logic of any language, and Clojure can do everything Java can. It's what's called a "functional language", which brings a lot of cool features with it as far as how you think of code, but it requires a very different viewpoint. Many people find it a bit alien, but, once you know another language or two, it's worth looking at Clojure to see what you can do in so few statements. Most languages try to get the computer to understand what the human is saying, but Clojure makes you speak in a way the computer can naturally understand. Once you get it, it's pretty elegant.

PHP

PHP is a bastard language. It's like JavaScript for people who don't want to let other people's computers do the heavy lifting. It is almost entirely a server-side language with good support in the most broadly-adopted server, Apache. There are also a few other ways to use it that make it a little more modern, like Laravel. It makes it really easy to format things. Essentially, it's for people who want to write HTML but need something that can respond dynamically, but who (understandably) hate (the demon fartspawn) JavaScript. Since it's not JS, though, it can't run in the browser, which is a real ding for modern web work.

Other Languages

Oh, you like Swift? Ruby? C#? Go? Fuckin'... Hack? There are a million languages for cool dudes. Most will die (watch the obituaries for Clojure, though I send get well cards every day), but if someone wants to push for their dying baby, I welcome their doing so in the comments.

Choose a language and GOGOGO

Hopefully one of these will sound like the tool for the job. Hop into it and write a "Hello, world" program. Figure out what you want your program to do from there, sketch out a flowchart ("I want to get data from this site and this site, and I want to use them both do make this data. Then I want to collect that over time and..."), and start trying to implement it. When you have a problem ("How the fuck am I supposed to pull tables from a site that doesn't have a fucking API???"), Google it, make a small sketch that uses what you learned, and debug it until it works. Then roll that into your code.

I hope this was helpful, and I hope it encourages you to give the divine fuckery that is programming a go. It's not as bad as you might think, and it's worse than you could ever imagine.

Other Resources

This is, by no means at all, a complete guide to programming. This is, in fact, maybe a small step better than a garbage list of tools. Here, though, are some things you'll probably want to learn as you go:

https://www.codecademy.com/ : A great place to learn a number of languages and tools interactively. The learning curve is pretty gentle and it's solidly arranged.

Version control: As you code, you're quickly going to save something bad over something good and proceed to shit your pants trying to get back to where you started. For that, there's version control. Look into GitHub, and you can start putting your code there. If you fuck something up, you can look through the history of changes you've made and go back to before The Incident.

Regular expressions: If you want to look through a web page and find everywhere it discusses Hot Russian Teens With Guns And Alligators, that's pretty easy, but there are a lot of times you want your search to be a little bit less specific. For that, you can use regular expressions to find (Hot|Sexy|Aged) (Russian|Chechen) (Teens|Milfs|Putins) With (Guns|Kittens). The flexibility of regular expressions makes just about anything possible, and essentially makes trivial all the splitting-apart-of-text I hated so much when I was doing C in school.

The command line: Remember when I said you should use Linux (or some Unix variant)? Yeah, you won't know why until you hop on the Cool Dude Command Line. It's where things get done. If you want to do something more complicated than what can be trivially represented with icons (as will constantly be the case with coding), you'll want to drop to the command line. I use TotalTerminal for Mac, Guake for Linux, and Cmder for Windows so I can quickly drop to a command line and back again with a keypress. It's handier than you might think.

IRC: If you have something more pressing than what you can have answered in Stack Overflow, most projects have an IRC you can go to. If your question is low-priority, post it to Stack Overflow. And your question is low priority. Almost guaranteed. That said, if you find a legit bug, or if you really need expert help, you might be able to find a good IRC with some smart folks.

alternativeto.net: I often find something that's alllllmost what I want. I can, from time to time, find something here that has the je ne sais quoi that makes it do what I want.

Markdown: If you want to tell other programmers a thing, it's frequently good to do it in Markdown. It's like HTML for people that have better things to do.