Learn How to Code Part I: Variables and Basic Data Types Learn to Code Part II: Working With Variables @pllee123: Much as I agree with the college classes are a good way to go. I've been a developer for over five years now and I've never been to a class in my life. It was just curiosity that caught me. I learnt everything I know whilst on the job. I think the most important thing is curiosity. @pllee123: I'm hoping that this will give me a (re-)start in a language again. @pllee123: It doesnt take classes. Back in 1998 we used to joke; what did the high skewl drop out say to the CS major? And now... there are tons of free resources to learn pretty much anything, and forums and chat channels to exploit. I wrote my first program when I was 12, wrote my first ML program when I was 13. The nest way to learn is to not be afraid of what you don't know and have a real problem to solve.
5 Great Resources To Learn How To Code However, more often than not, there seems to be a problem of actually finding good content online that can teach you to code. Experimenting with a language can only get you so far. To master it, you need to have proper guidance from people who actually know what they are talking about. So where can you find expert guidance without shelling out a fortune for it? Dream In Code Just taking a look at their logo ought to tell you that the community at Dream In Code isn’t something to mess around with. They have everything. They also have a video channel and links to developers’ blogs if you want to look deeper. W3Schools If what you want to master is a Web technology, you’ve got to give W3Schools a look. You can get tutorials ranging from plain-Jane HTML, right up to AJAX and the likes. Eloquent JavaScript If you’ve ever had to use a Greasemonkey Script or a Bookmarklet, you have a clue about the kind of power that JavaScript possesses. TryRuby A Miscellany of HTML5 Tutorials
Learn to Code Part III: Arrays and Logic Statements A few tips: (1) You can easily create an array simply by using the literal notation, e.g.: var myArray = ["foo", "bar"]; (2) This might seem like splitting hairs, but unless you're doing some kind of array mutation where this would be sensitive, it is more performant to store the length of the array in another variable before iterating, rather than checking it every time through the loop. for (var i = 0, len = myArray.length; i < len; i++) { ... } (3) Either your examples are assuming var i was already declared, or you're leaking globals again. (4) Perhaps this is a little advanced to bring up, but I'll mention it nonetheless because it's VERY important. For those interested, I've seen Eloquent JavaScript recommended time and again as a great introduction to JavaScript as well as programming. Also if you eventually become serious about understanding crucial concepts of the language, be sure to pick up JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford.
Learn To Code At Any Level With Google Code University Whether it’s for fun, for work, or for something else, programming knowledge is becoming more and more relevant in today’s world. We’re spending more and more time online, so it’s only natural for us to need to have more knowledge of how to build and maintain the sites and applications we know and love. Thanks to Google, in collaboration with schools around the United States, there’s a massive resource for learning how to program and code on the Web. It’s called Google Code University, and is a great place to learn coding and programming, or just to brush up on your skills. GCU is broken into a few different courses ““ AJAX Programming, Algorithms, Distributed Systems, Web Security, and Languages. Before you really get started with Google Code University, you might want to take a look at the CS Curriculum Resources link. Within each course, there’s a ton of useful information. The Video Lectures Google provides are my favorite part of the whole thing, though. Are you a coder?
Top 10 Professional Sample Code Websites For Programmers Most programmers are not just desktop programmers, web programmers or scripting gurus – they are often all of the above. Over time, most software developers find that it’s much easier to re-use code components than it is to recreate the wheel every time you write an application. Over time, these developers typically archive a library of these reusable modules in order to save time the next time they need to do the same task. Now, thanks to the power of the Internet, there is a proliferation of websites where professional programmers offer these modules to the general public for absolutely free. Choosing the Top Websites for Sample Code Every developer has a list of their favorite websites where they not only search for free sample code, but they also take part in the developer community that exists at these sites. The following is, by no means, an exhaustive list of the best developer websites online. #1 – Programmer’s Heaven #2 – SourceForge.net #3 – CodeGuru #4 – The Code Project #5 – DevX
Learn to Code Epilogue: Best Practices and Additional Resources Great post. The bit about comments being even for yourself 6 months from now is so true it's not even funny. Just to clarify (and further stress) why eval in JavaScript is evil: It's not that it just treats a string as a variable per se; it attempts to *execute* any string as JavaScript code. This means that you could put anything that would run in JavaScript into a string, throw it into that function, and it'd run. Why is this evil? Security, because if you somehow manage to throw some unsanitized user input straight into an eval call, you're basically opening yourself up to a potential world of hurt. Performance, because in order to execute the string passed to eval as code, an additional instance of the JavaScript runtime is fired up to execute it. Also keep in mind, calling setTimeout with a string parameter is equivalent to calling eval; you should pass setTimeout a function instead whenever possible. A couple other random notes related to JavaScript: function doStuff() { return {
10 Websites That Can Help The Beginner Programmer With Sample Code Snippets Sample code that is freely available is also a great learning aid. For the beginner programmer it’s not a shortcut; as a programmer you won’t get far if you take that shortcut. Free sample codes could be hints on how you can structure your own commands and functions to program better. Developers can piggyback on free sample programs and reuse snippets in their own code to save development time, cost, and sweat. Ryan helped us out with the Top 10 Professional Sample Code Websites for Programmers. As a newbie, I went searching out for more. Snipplr A well designed code library which you can source for reusable code and you can also store your own. The site also has a few plugins like the Firefox and Safari Bookmarklets which make storing and retrieving code easy (see the directory mention). Stack Overflow Stack Overflow is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for programmers. Hot Scripts 48,000 code samples in over 1,000 categories from Ajax to XML is covering a lot. Koders DZone
Hello Worlds - The Chronicle Review By MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM Why humanities students should learn to program The first program most people learn to write in any computer language is called Hello World. As a computer-savvy English professor, I'm often asked how I came by my knowledge. Once I became an undergraduate English major, I took computer-programming courses to fulfill my institution's general-education requirement. On the one hand, I can see now that I was being taught fundamentals: variables, arrays, sorts, conditionals, operators, and the like. Many of us in the humanities think our colleagues across the campus in the computer-science department spend most of their time debugging software. Those models are made of words and symbols which, by their nature, can be intimidating. Many programmers talk openly of the aesthetics of code, using terms like beautiful or artful in the same way that a grandmaster might describe a game of chess (another formal activity par excellence). Is the real world really that simple?