Learning to code?

Dimi

Dimi

Dimi

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Joined
10 Sep 2008
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London
Hi there,

Quite interested in doing this in my free time, I've come across SoloLearn and their apps in the Google playstore.

They have quite a few options, not sure where to start? For someone who uses Android & Windows on a daily basis what's my best option?
 
ok, great that you want to learn to code but no one can really advise you one way or another until you can answer a few questions:

What platforms do you want to program for?
What type of things do you want to write?
How much time are you willing to invest?
Do you have any programming knowledge already?
 
AHarvey said:
ok, great that you want to learn to code but no one can really advise you one way or another until you can answer a few questions:

What platforms do you want to program for?
What type of things do you want to write?
How much time are you willing to invest?
Do you have any programming knowledge already?
Click to expand...

Hey, thanks for the reply.

I'm starting from absolute zero, I want to do something with mobile apps. Be it on Apple's or Google's platform.

I know with Apple I'm looking at Swift and Google Java. Which of the two or any other would I be better of starting with?
 
Start with whichever you already have the hardware for.

You can develop for Android using a Mac or a PC, but you can only develop for iOS using a Mac.

As you're starting from scratch there's no point shelling out a bunch of money for something you may not like. Just make up a simple project for yourself and have a go using whatever you have.
 
You could go that route, or a more cross-platform app route? There's solutions to target both at the same time, even through javascript and html (both useful skills in themselves even without the app aspect).

If you do want to go Swift and iOs native, I am assuming you own a mac?

If you want to go native for both, there's a few great courses I can recommend from Udemy :).
 
Scotty123 said:
You could go that route, or a more cross-platform app route? There's solutions to target both at the same time, even through javascript and html (both useful skills in themselves even without the app aspect).

If you do want to go Swift and iOs native, I am assuming you own a mac?

If you want to go native for both, there's a few great courses I can recommend from Udemy :).
Click to expand...

https://www.udemy.com/user/robpercival/
https://www.udemy.com/the-complete-android-developer-course/
https://www.udemy.com/the-complete-ios-9-developer-course/

His lessons seem highly rated.
 
I develop for both ios using swift and android using android studio, and also c# for desktop apps (was going to go windows phoine too but I think it's days are numbered).

I'm a die hard apple hater but have to admit that the xcode environment and swift itself is impressive. Shame I have to use a mac for this.

Android studio is also good but less refined. The big plus about android is that it uses Java which is uses everywhere, not just in phones, but is a lot less forgiving than swift.

If you want to develop mobile apps, you'll get a good experience with either.

I learned as I went along, deciding what I wanted then working out how to do it. Kept me interested but in hindsight I would have liked to learn the development process, not the programming, more the planning and breaking it down into processes. Too late for me, old dog, new tricks etc :)
 
Arduino?

The IDE starts easy (you're actually doing/learning C).. then you can actually program C an C++ in there too.

You will need a hardware board to run the program. It's simplistic but will teach you the starting points without needing to worry about the complexities of UI/IDE or phones etc.
Then once you're used to programming that - switch to a full phone development IDE.

I'm taking it that you've not coded before at all..
 
Hi Dimi,

Rob Percival has amazing videos on Udemy, I highly recommend them.

What are you thinking goals wise?

If it's just for intellectual curiosity then maybe C is a place to start. However as a beginner I don't expect you to understand the build system "make" early on or even use it to good effect. But you can write some trivial and non trivial programs in C and learn a lot. If you are interested in Computer Science and are bored of C tutorials, try writing an autocomplete program. Load it up with a dictionary and use console input to give suggestions when ever you type a character onto the screen. My company once used this as part of the coding part of the interview process.

If you want to be able to write an application (think a webservice or maybe even your own start up idea), That is when you want to try out a language like Python, which is great and lets you achieve a hell of a lot in a small amount of time. I personally love Python and I have mainly worked in the start up space on ML and NLP using Python to first understand the problem space and a possible solution. Ruby is also an equally good language that helps you to get **** done.

You can even try Java, I write code used in serving ads based on ML/NLP and for something that gets a huge volume of requests an hour, I prefer statically typed languages like Java. Also Java's concurrency primitives and libraries are very well documented and easy to use, you also get the JIT optimisation which can seriously reduce latency once you have warmed up the JVM.

Most important thing tbh is just get started, what ever language you decide. Most of what you learn is transferable.
 
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