Hands-On Experience
rajat.jpegThe best way to learn is through a project that you love, not through classes. Just get started, even if you know nothing.
Rajat Bhageria, is the founder of ThirdEye Glass and CafeMocha.org, author of What High School Didn’t Teach Me and in his spare time, he writes tech opinion and prediction pieces for the Huffington Post.
Jothin Reddy Vedre is passionate about technology loves to program applications and do research. His interests lie in the field of Machine Learning and Robotics.
Seek Helpful Criticism
sylvain.jpegGet honest feedback on your idea and first version.
Sylvain Gauchet is passionate about lean startup, cabo verde telemarketing database content marketing and mobile apps promotion. He loves finding a market, creating great new products or services and getting them known.
I’d say stop reading textbooks, pick a simple idea and make it. Search Stack Overflow when you get stuck.
Stuart Hill enjoys writing about mobile development, the App Store and everything in that world.
Make Learning Fun
tr.jpegFind a problem that excites you. Let solving that problem guide your learning and your choice of tools.
Tim O’Reilly founder and CEO, O’Reilly Media.
Ask for Another Set of Eyes
david h.jpegRelease early and release often, that way you’ll get honest feedback from your actual users, you’ll know if you’re on the right path with you idea, and if it’s worth your time and effort. Also, contribute on an open-source project if you haven’t, you’ll learn a lot from other people’s code and way of working.
David Hsieh is a software developer and passionate about tech startups.
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If you are finding it difficult, be patient with yourself.
Read other people’s code. Particularly try to find well-written code. There are infinitely many ways to write even simple programs, and some ways are better than others. Other people will appreciate well-written, well documented programs, so write your programs for people to read.
The key to good code is how your organise the parts of the program, how you modularise. Focus on putting closely related things together, and on making each part of the program do only one job.
Dr. Peter Schachte is a lecturer in the Department of Computing and Information Systems at The University of Melbourne. Schachte has been involved in programming language research and development since the 1980s.
Schachte also suggests, “When you’ve become comfortable with one language, learn a completely different one. You should aim to learn: a low-level procedural language (C is a good choice) because it will give you a good understanding of how the computer actually operates; an object-oriented one (eg, Java, C++, C#) because they favour abstract datatypes and they’re widely used; a functional one (eg, Haskell, OCaml, ML, F#) because they emphasise what the program should do over how it should do it, and because they encourage high-level abstractions; a scripting language (eg, Python, Ruby, Bash) because they’re useful for quick hacks; and a logic programming language (eg, Prolog) because they broaden what functional languages teach you.”
Stay Updated on New Technologies and Languages
Learn new technologies.
Be open about criticism against your code.
Document your code, not only for others but also for yourself. You won’t remember the reasoning you had a few months later.
Do not write code that you won’t need. Because you will be responsible to maintain that.
Learn at least one scripting language, ideally cross platform.
Mustafa Zengin is a software development engineer at Microsoft and his main interests entail: programming languages, algorithms, logic and semantics.
janchris.jpgOpen every black box and see what’s inside.
Frameworks, libraries, languages, never mind if you can’t understand what you find under the hood on your first attempt. You can always put them aside and return to them later, just see to it that you can take them apart and have a look.
All the rules you have to follow when you first learn were invented by someone, you can make them yours to reinvent with some persistence. Steer clear of tools that put barriers in the way of this activity, those make you depend