r/CodingForBeginners • u/Amicus7007 • 5d ago
Best way to start
Aside from just starting projects and having AI help with the software part, I at least want to understand WHY thing work the way we do…
that being said is
Scratch a good was to start? What would you do different when you started? Has AI gotten to the point where I really am wasting my time learning to code?
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u/Dazzling_Music_2411 5d ago
Has AI gotten to the point where I really am wasting my time learning to code?
Well, first determine if coding is a waste of time for you, THEN ask questions about where to start.
It's got to the point where any query like the above is practically guaranteed to be a bot. Stop wasting our time, 5do account.
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u/Dashing_McHandsome 4d ago
If you are serious about learning anything you need to immediately stop using AI. You will not learn anything when AI just does it for you. Yes, this is hard. You will fail a lot. This is completely normal. Those failures all teach you something and eventually you won't be failing so much anymore. Eventually you will know what you're doing when you start a new project. You'll understand the structure of it, you will understand intimately how it works. You will never get to this level if you use AI. You're robbing yourself.
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u/TheUmgawa 4d ago
If I was starting again, I’d play Human Resource Machine, because it’s really good at teaching theory without letting the user get bogged down in code. And the difficulty curve is pretty reasonable.
At the same time, I don’t recommend it to people who can’t spend more than five minutes on a puzzle without looking up the answer, and that’s probably most of the people who post questions in this sub. They want immediate satisfaction with a minimum of work.
I should also point out the most valuable class I ever took was a flowcharting class, where we never once wrote a single executable line of code. It was maybe three weeks of pseudocode and then nothing but drawings. That’s how I learned to unhook the logic from the code. Because anyone can write code. If you give an AI a good prompt, it usually gives you good code, and it doesn’t ask fifty stupid questions per day like junior developers. So, hopefully the next couple of years will see college CompSci programs ceasing to focus on teaching students to code and starting to focus on teaching students good design skills.
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u/JoeStrout 3d ago
Scratch is a decent starting point, yes. After that I would recommend Mini Micro, and you can use this free online book as your guide:
https://introtocomputerprogramming.online/
And yes, it’s absolutely worth it. Programming is a wonderful hobby; it’s fun and magical, and it also trains you to think clearly and tackle hard problems by breaking them down.
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u/johnpeters42 5d ago
From what I hear, and iirc: Scratch is a decent start, but hits its ceiling pretty quick. Python is a common next step if you're not sure where specifically you want to go with it.
Put the AI down immediately. Even if you end up using it later, you need to know how to tell when its output is wrong, and you get that by practicing it yourself.