Simplicity the ultimate sophistication ~ LD(Leonardo Da Vinci)
There is a growing uproar of people wanting to start coding and gurus merging to offer courses. With the amount of information available and the speed with which courses are released every day, it is a daunting process for a beginner, with so much information and FOMO about each offered course and online materials, that I wish would end, but NO, even for an experienced software developer like me, who has vast experience coding enterprise applications, this is not going to end anytime soon.
LD was on to something with the quote above. We need simplicity to be looked at initially, filtering out things that do not fit into the master plan of our journey as beginners in coding/programming. My respect goes out to educational institutions for the effort they put into creating a syllabus and making it relevant in this ever-changing technological world. I started my software development journey in varsity, where I got introduced to C++ programming language, a harsh start if you know about other programming languages, but from there on I appreciated other programming languages for their simplicity, easy to learn, but then again I can attribute everything I learned from the genesis language I started with, cause in all of them I see some dialect adaptation from it, trying to simplify this post as simple as possible for someone whos looking to get to programming in any industry, a programming language is a language consisting of keywords and structure symbols to use in creating an application, aka coding, just like English you use some language to build some program.
School got it right by having a concise syllabus, outlining each topic, so students can drill it down and improve their understanding. From there one develops an appetite for further knowledge. Learning outside educational institutions has no boundaries, there is a lot of things to go through and syllabus set out, with no assurance of getting your self-taught credentials getting recognized by a potential employer, its a challenging process to go through learning on your own, it needs discipline, patience and strength, overall the ultimate goals beginners want is validation from potential employers to be hired and they can say they have really achieved being a self-taught programmer, another approach I have seen trend is freelancing after being self taught, which is an ideal path for beginners who currently are not employed and looking into the tech industry.
How to start then ?, with trying to follow the doctrine in varsity, I have composed my own syllabus I would advise someone who wants to start coding. Through all courses I have seen online, a lot of specialties exist among courses and as a beginner, I feel that’s not a route one needs to take right away, hence my focus is a fruit salad approach, touching every aspect of software development and being integrated into an ongoing software project. I want to partner with you after going through my syllabus. This approach opens you to a world of open-source contribution, where you help contribute code to existing software applications that are open to use around the world.
Below are links to courses I have evaluated and are free to learn, after doing the below you can contact me to showcase what you have absorbed:
1 – 2 Months
- 1 https://www.udacity.com/course/java-programming-basics–ud282 or https://www.w3schools.com/python/(easier)
Hala for an extensive self-made boot camp syllabus version.
