1) when I was learning...as a 10 year old in 1985...lack of available learning materials and no one to ask questions. I got a magazine once a month, no one I knew could program. And the only language I had at my disposal was GW-Basic.
Now: there are probably too many available resources. I'm teaching my kids and the amount of materials is staggering.
2) Just sitting down at the computer and struggling with it -- not looking for the easy way out, figuring out things myself. Teaching only gets you one step of the way, after that it is all you. I would spend hours ready every book I could and writing small programs.
2) Second part was programming as part of a team and doing code reviews. That will shape you up like nothing else. But you can't do this step if you don't do the other part (writing lots of code on your own).
I started programming in 1984, writing in C64 basic, and didn't move on to C and assembler until 1989 (shortly after borrowing a modem from a friend), simply because I didn't even know such languages existed until then.
There's a staggering amount of (free!) information available nowadays for the budding programmer, to the point where your only major challenge is discerning the good from the bad (and that's easy enough to solve). The biggest accelerator to learning is having a pet project or three.
Comments
1) when I was learning...as a 10 year old in 1985...lack of available learning materials and no one to ask questions. I got a magazine once a month, no one I knew could program. And the only language I had at my disposal was GW-Basic. Now: there are probably too many available resources. I'm teaching my kids and the amount of materials is staggering.
2) Just sitting down at the computer and struggling with it -- not looking for the easy way out, figuring out things myself. Teaching only gets you one step of the way, after that it is all you. I would spend hours ready every book I could and writing small programs.
2) Second part was programming as part of a team and doing code reviews. That will shape you up like nothing else. But you can't do this step if you don't do the other part (writing lots of code on your own).
This.
I started programming in 1984, writing in C64 basic, and didn't move on to C and assembler until 1989 (shortly after borrowing a modem from a friend), simply because I didn't even know such languages existed until then.
There's a staggering amount of (free!) information available nowadays for the budding programmer, to the point where your only major challenge is discerning the good from the bad (and that's easy enough to solve). The biggest accelerator to learning is having a pet project or three.