My Four-Year Journey to Learning Programming

It took me over 4 years to learn basic programming because I was overthinking and just copying other people’s code.

I wanted to learn programming to standout from others that were applying to cybersecurity positions without any knowledge of programming.

I tried Codecademy, YouTube tutorials, books, and courses on Udemy but I just couldn’t understand it. There were many times when I thought I just wasn’t smart enough to learn programming, but I kept trying and finally figured it out.

Here’s my advice if you want to get start with programming…

• Pick a language. It doesn’t matter what language you pick. Python, Golang, Java, JavaScript, Rust, Ruby, C#, C/C++… It really doesn’t matter. Just pick one and start.
• Learn the basics of that language. Find a free tutorial that shows how to setup the development environment, and learn the basic data types (strings, integers, arrays, and hash maps) and control structures (looping and if/else) for that language.
• Start building. Find an easy project at home or work that you think is interesting and write your own code. The books and courses usually have you work on projects that aren’t really useful for anything, and you’re also following someone else’s code. I think you will learn more if you pick a project that doesn’t already have a solution in front of you and build it yourself.
• Read the docs. Reference the documentation for your language, but if you get stuck, it’s okay to use Stack Overflow and other resources. I suggest that you try to avoid finding a complete solution though.
• Keep trying. It’s okay if it doesn’t work at first. After more than 4 years of study and practice, it still took me several weeks to write less than 100 lines of Python that connected to some network devices, ran some commands, and saved the outputs to a file. I cringe when I look back at that code but that’s when it started to click for me, and I’ve continued to get better since.

If you want to learn to code, check out our Coding Foundations tutorial.

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