In today’s tech job market, coding has emerged as one of the hottest and most popular skills. Aspiring youngsters from around the world are rapidly leaping into this field, attracted by the myriad opportunities and salaries that coding jobs promise. However, this only means that the competition is higher and tougher than ever. Thus, to get on top of the ladder and be hired by the magnates of the tech world, you must keep your coding game on point! The key is to ace programming. You’ve got to be a fast, yet efficient learner. Here are tips that’ll help you learn programmer faster!
- Get Handsy – Learn While You Write
No matter what discipline you choose to pursue, learning is always better when accompanied by hands-on practice. Although while reading up on a particular coding concept, it may seem very easy to you, putting it to a real-world use case is an entirely different thing altogether. As a beginner, you’ll often find yourself stuck in situations where you can’t remember a specific detail of a particular syntax if you don’t practice by implementing what you’ve learned by writing your own code.
- Build A Strong Knowledge Base Of The Fundamentals
If your foundation is faulty, you’ll never be able to perfect your programming skills. So, it’s important to master the fundamental concepts of coding such as variables, errors & exceptions, queues & stacks, streams, callbacks, and then move on to more advanced concepts such as reactive programming, declarative programming, imperative programming, and so on.
- Practice Coding By Hand
Although it may sound like a medieval technique now that we are super reliant on computers, however, trust us when we say, writing code by hand is one of the best practices every aspiring programmer should incorporate in his/her learning routine. When you start coding on pen and paper, you’ll see that it requires a lot of precision and planning. Also, when you write the code by hand, you can always check for errors and correct it without even having to run it first. This habit might just become a boon for you later in life when you are going to sit for job interviews. Interviewers often ask candidates to write the codes on paper or a whiteboard.
You wouldn’t want to miss out on a job prospect just because you cannot code on paper, do you?
- Don’t Hold Back In Asking For Help
Every programmer needs help, and that’s why there’s a whole community of developers and programmers dedicated to helping fellow programmers in times of need. If you find a bug in your code, be sure that someone has already faced the same problem at some point in time. Reaching out to others and asking for help from them not only allows you to learn different ways to solve coding problems but also to expand your network. Platforms such as Stack Overflow, Reddit, Hacker News, and SitePoint, among others.
- Explore Online Resources
In the beginning, it is very natural to get stuck. You might find certain concepts much difficult to understand than others. But don’t worry! There’s plenty of helpful and informative stuff online. You can try out learning platforms such as Codeacademy, Codewars, edX, Coding Ninjas, Coursera, and Udacity, to name a few.
- Try Tweaking The Sample Code
If you want to become an expert programmer, just reading the sample code won’t suffice. You must play and experiment with it. Try making minor modifications to the sample code and run it. See how those small changes alter the functionality of your code. Doing this will help you understand what works best for a code.
These six tips will surely help you learn to code faster and more efficiently, while simultaneously allowing you to improve your programming skills. Be patient with yourself. Don’t give up at the slightest of failures. Instead, try to come up with better solutions with every new try. Don’t view programming as a task, view it as a fun challenge and you’ll see the entire learning process has become more exciting.
Happy coding!
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