Programming a computer may seem like a daunting task, but it’s actually one of the simplest things you can learn — provided that it’s taught properly.
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\nIt helps to be motivated to learn anything. I’m sure some people would be reluctant to into outer space or date a celebrity if they lacked proper motivation.<\/p>\n
The motivation to learn a programming language could be for a career, to start your own billion dollar app company, to complete a dratted college course, or just curiosity. No matter what, if you’re willing to learn, I can teach you how to program. It’s really easy.<\/p>\n
The problem with teaching programming is that the people who teach it are generally programmers — and they’re good at what they do. They’ve been doing it so long that everything makes sense. They don’t question anything. And they completely forget what it’s like to be a beginner. This holds true today as much as it did back in the early 1980s, back when I first learned to program.<\/p>\n
Back in the microcomputer era, learning was done by reading books.<\/p>\n
Weird, I know.<\/p>\n
I purchased tons of books on programming. Generally, they were all the same: a huge, complex program opened Chapter 1 and never left. The author would talk down the reader. And it seemed, for the most part, that he was more interested in impressing his colleagues than teaching a beginner.<\/p>\n
To prove how nothing changes, recently I watched an online training course for learning C programming. The first “lesson” was about 4 minutes long. It featured the standard Looking at that online course through a beginner’s eyes, I could imagine how daunting it would be. Heck, I’d give up! Based on the course, programming was obviously too complex. Yep, things haven’t changed much.<\/p>\n My approach is simple: Small programs. Immediate feedback.<\/p>\n That simple approach is how I first learned to program. The BASIC training manual that came with my TRS-80 was based on an earlier work done by Dr. David A. Lien, Learning TRS-80 BASIC<\/em>. All the examples were small, maybe 10 lines of code maximum for each program. That made it easy to type and especially to view all at once on the screen.<\/p>\n Then, throughout the text, new concepts were introduced by subtly modifying the code. You’d change one thing, then run the code to see how it worked. That prompted experimentation, which works when you’re learning to program. Feedback is immediate; the compiler (or interpreter) pretty much knows exactly what the problem is and where in the code things went awry. That’s a great way to learn, as opposed to the “You Got It Wrong!” approach for other complex things, such as accounting and women.<\/p>\n You’d think this method would be well-known and popular now, but it’s not. And teaching this way is no secret, as it’s been done successfully for years. Lamentably, some things never change.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here’s my take on the best way to learn programming.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6426"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6438,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6426\/revisions\/6438"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Hello, World<\/code> program, but the code was several dozen lines long. It also included two header files, one referenced inside the other. (If that doesn’t make sense, then understand that it’s just a complicated, awkward thing to do.)<\/p>\n