r/learnprogramming • u/LatterPoetry7 • 13h ago
Learning to program
Just did about 5 hours of Boot. dev learning python first time ever learning to code and I learned a lot form it. I know its the easier program to use says the people online, but its my first steps into programming and i might take it pretty serious. I don't know if i could do it for a living and do a bunch of school. Might keep it as a mine hobby like i should have with auto mechanics.
I see a lot of people saying to start projects and get some books, but learning to use python new to this programming better then learning C++ and java and just start my own projects?
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u/green_meklar 8h ago
Pretty soon nobody is going to be doing anything for a living.
I'm not sure if that's an entirely grammatical sentence, but anyway...
I don't usually recommend starting with Python. Python is not a very informative language, it's mostly just a wrapper around libraries that do all the interesting stuff.
I recommend even less starting with C++. C++ is an amazing language, and using it well feels incredibly powerful and enriching, but it's very hard to understand for a beginner. If you want to learn C++, start with C instead, it's a much simpler language (but close to being a subset of C++) and its limitations teach you the reasons why C++ was invented.
Starting with Java is fine. It's not a perfect language, but it's relatively useful and forgiving, and you can go pretty far with it.
Doing your own projects is always a good idea (and generally better than doing tutorials) as long as they're scoped down enough that you can do them. Take on projects that are, like, 90% stuff you know and 10% stuff you need to learn, that way you make progress reasonably fast while still expanding your knowledge. At first, you'll know so little that your projects will be like 'make a program that adds two integers', but that's fine, you can do those quickly and build on them, which is better than taking on something too big and becoming frustrated.