Beginner Experiences

Question

Help beginners like me with best learning experiences

Answer 1

What learning experience? Can you be more specific with your question?

Answer 2

Best advice is to understand that programming is 1000 bits of knowledge. You'll learn one at a time. With each lesson, you should make sure you understand it and not rush to the next topic. Find a way to practice what you've learned.

You're first programs will do things like printing your name on the screen. Adding a couple numbers together. Then maybe some basic loops to do those things repeatedly. These are silly programs, of course, but they help you learn.

Once you have a very basic understanding of variables, loops, and if statements, you'll be able to write slightly more complex programs. Just keep applying the skills you learn and write a few more programs ASIDE from what's in the exercises. This way you can make sure you understand.

As you advance, write new programs that use the new things you've learned. Keep each topic in it's own source file. You can build a collection of examples of what YOU have written. It doesn't matter if you do it on your computer, a SoloLearn code bit, or a cloud playground. You may be writing a bunch of tiny programs before you feel comfortable enough to do something bigger. Just take your time.

Eventually you will know enough to write a small game, such as a dice game, or a guess the number game, or perhaps hang-man.

I probably coded for a few months before I wrote anything worth playing. I wrote a Wheel of Fortune game, no graphics, that had a large list of possible phrases and implemented the basic logic of that game show. You guess letters and they reveal. Eventually you win. I had the "spin the wheel" feature which randomly generated a prize and kept scores for you. It was actually pretty fun. The hardest part was getting the 100 or so phrases loaded into the program. But the game was genuinely fun to play. I never went back and added graphics to it. But I did learn a lot as I had to track the word, the guesses, the scores, etc. Probably took me a month to write it.

Understand that learning to code is a lot of work. But well worth it.