The best way to learn programming if you’re teaching yourself

This answer by Saurav Sharma, Full Stack Python Developer in QUORA

I was maybe 7–8 years old, my uncle had a computer at his home which looked similar to this: I don’t remember the specs but maybe it was Pentium 2/3 with a windows 95 operating system.

It was summer vacation and as a typical Indian kid, I went to stay at my uncle’s place. I used to spend a lot of time on the computer. I had no idea about programming, mostly I used to play games like Dave, Wolf 3d, Aladdin, etc

. Later my uncle decided to uninstall games and I was left with no choice but to tinker around with other programs which the computer had.

I played around with Microsoft power point as it had some fun pictures in clipart and managed to somehow animate them. Within a few days,

I became quite fluent with MS PowerPoint. Next vacation my parents decided to enroll me in a computer class called “MS-CIT” which is quite a basic computer course for beginners. However, the issue was that I already knew the basics. Later it was decided that I would join the institute to learn C programming language.

I was about 9–10 years old maybe in 5th grade and I was learning C. I can remember that there were only a handful of students in the class and I was the youngest.

The teacher however was extremely good at explaining things and that made a lot of difference. In the first week, we were taught about simple programs like hello world, addition, print, scan statements, etc.

We were given 30 minutes to practice code and it took me a good amount of time to just write a simple hello world program. I used to copy the code from the whiteboard and later just type it into the turbo c editor which looked something like this:

Initially, it was all over my head, I didn’t understand a lot of things. I considered my-selves a genius even if I was able to fix the syntax errors.

Eventually, after about a month, I became quite decent with C and was able to write simple programs on my own. After that school started and I had to quit the class, there was no computer at my home to practice.

I remember our computer teacher in school asking us what we did on vacations. He was shocked when I told him I learned C programming language. It was kind of cool to say that, I felt proud the first time.

In the next 5 years, I never had a chance to code because of the unavailability of a computer. I started back later after years when my parents bought me a computer and since then I’ve never looked back.

I went from learning HTML to Java and Python, I was in love with Java until I discovered Python. I still remember learning Java from a big fat book called the Java black book. Later when I joined college for a CS degree, programming was child’s play for me.

I would finish my lab assignments in minutes and spend most of my time helping other classmates in the lab. I then started to learn more about web development, and different frameworks like bootstrap, Django, Flask, etc which were never taught in our college.

I also jumped into android development just as a hobby, however with a crappy laptop it was quite difficult to get the emulator started. I still remember how I saved money by not having coffee during my college breaks just so that I can buy 1GB of data.

A big breakthrough happened when I got a broadband connection, it was now much easier for me to get access to unlimited resources on the internet. I researched and read a ton of blogs, tutorials, and videos on youtube, etc to learn as much as I could. Since then there is no looking back and the journey continues to date.

finally: The Ultimate Guide For Beginners To Learn Coding