You’re deciding to pick up some code, drop into the text editor and spank out some awesome scripts, right? Eh, maybe, maybe not. Well, besides the obvious answers of picking a script at a script repository site, you just have to search for it, search for script templates or what not, and then modifying it to your needs.
Or just picking up a book and working it on how to learn a particular language and working it from start to finish, you might be wondering what else is available.
Watch the video or read the transcription:
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Or save the audio for later, if you’d prefer:
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While those can work, until you actually dig down into it and work actual examples, see your scripts out there, iterate with them, live with them for weeks and months, from the nitty gritty to the end result package, you’re not really going to get a good feel for what parts of it do what.
I mean you can take any ‘ol script, modify it and put it up there and it will work. But that’s not understanding, that’s just implementation. I’ve recently found, and you’ll have to forgive me because there are two sites that are great that have almost the exact same address, one of them is more hands-on training and the other is self-training.
The one I’m talking about is CodeAcademy.com I believe is the one with self-training. I think there’s also a .Net or .Org, but the Code Academy – they don’t have every language on there but they have a good helping of languages, like HTML, CSS – I know those aren’t tricky languages but – and PHP and some other stuff on there.
The website technology actually prompts you to run through examples and then corrects you as you go along so it’s as if you’re being taught in an actual class and you’re working through examples. It keeps track of your progress, it will remind you at a set schedule to come back and do some more if you’ve taken a break. It’s really pretty awesome. I commend the folks behind it because it helped me just jump back into PHP some time ago and it’s really interesting.
So if you’re looking for a hands-on but not really needing – oh, and it’s free. Hello? But if you’re looking for a hands-on, free, no need to adhere to a strict schedule kind of approach to learning a language or how to program, I highly recommend Googling up Code Academy and checking it out.
It might just blow your mind, you might just learn a new language and you might become the next big programming thing. But don’t give up on the first one if it doesn’t stick with you. Try a new one, there’s plenty out there and they all kind of take the same mindset, they just have a different way of saying or making the programs, the computers and the hardware behind it do the same thing. They just have a different way of speaking to the hardware.
So once you get those concepts down, the language doesn’t really matter so much. Sorry all you purists out there, I figure you’re not watching this video so you don’t care about that kind of comment but really and truly just get good at thinking about how to make software talk to hardware and the language is just another tool in the toolbox. Code Academy, try it out, become a master. Or just pretty good at it.