Things Every Newbie Programmer Should Know & Do

Things Every Newbie Programmer Should Know & Do.

• Keep learning
• Start learning from Open source projects
• Read code
• Do a lot of practice

All of the points mentioned in this blog post are from the book I’m currently reading “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know”.

As I was reading this book I just thought to share it on my blog for students and newbies who haven’t read this book.

Keep Learning

To play it safe, you need to take responsibility for your own education. Don’t try to depend on computer institutes and their stale certificates and degrees.

• Start reading books, blogs, twitter feeds, magazines, and websites.
• Get hands-on by writing some code
• Find yourself a mentor
• Start fiddling with frameworks and libraries you use
• A good way to learn something is to teach or speak about it
• Join a local meetup group
• Listen to developer podcasts
• Learn a new language every year
• Learn and understand the language

Knowing how something works make you know how to use it better.

Start learning from Open source projects

Getting started with open source is pretty easy.

• You can start by offering help to fix the documentation of an open source project
• Read other people’s code. You can learn a lot by reading other people’s source code
• You can contribute your own code and ideas to the projects
• You will meet new like-minded people and become friends with them
• Open source contributions can help you to add real-world experience in the technology that actually interests you
• You can get community rewards, benefits and access to official project sites and documentation websites.

In order to find more open sourced software’s, components and frameworks head over to github.com and search for projects according to your favorite programming language.

Once you have done the searching and finding an interesting project according to your requirement, next start learning, using and contributing to that project on GitHub.

And if you were not able to find any projects, then build your own project and share it with the world. If you really want to get involved with projects online, you could offer to help out with the documentation or you could start by volunteering to write test code.

Contributing, helping and fixing open source projects and documentation, finding bugs, suggesting fixes and making friends will make you a better programmer than who is not doing open source.

Now go out there and fix some projects and documentations.

Read code

Start reading other people’s source code. Try to learn from other people’s mistakes and get better at coding.

Now from where should you start?

Open source projects…

Open source projects are full of good examples of how to write brilliant and readable code.

It’s always better to read some source code instead of a book if you need to improve your programming skills.

Do a lot of practice

you need Skills and Techniques to become good at something especially programming and with a lot of practice you can become a skilled programmer.

You need 10,000 hours of practice i.e. 416 days and 16 hours of practice to become an expert.

Practicing does not mean doing what you are good at; it means challenging yourself, doing what you are not good at.

Practicing is about learning, learning that changes you, learning that makes you better at coding and improves your coding skills.

All of the points mentioned in this blog post are from the book I’m currently reading “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know”.

As I was reading this book I just thought to share it on my blog for students and newbies who haven’t read this book.

Stay tuned!

Take Care!

Abhishek Luv