How to Teach Yourself to Code

Several times over the past few years I’ve been asked how I learned to code. I didn’t go to school for it, and it wasn’t originally something I aspired to do. So I never really had a good, straightforward answer, and just ended up rambling on for a while. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my path to becoming a software developer was almost as meandering as my answers, and just as packed with fitful starts and dead ends. So, I figured I would sit down and write it down, though unlike my Teach Yourself SQL post, this post’s scope is much wider, on just how to teach yourself to code in general.

Or, more specifically, how I taught myself. Everyone learns differently, so just because something worked for me this doesn’t mean it will work for someone else. I’ll try to also include “further reading” and other types of resources that I didn’t use, but I know to be useful.

So… how do you teach yourself to code?

0. Get Very Comfortable with Google

Or your search engine of choice.

The point is that part of being a software developer, or working in any capacity with technology, is being able to find and parse information online. You need to be able to form your question in a way someone else can understand, then find the appropriate resource, then understand what you’re reading.

This might be official documentation from a company about its products. It might be a StackOverflow post, or a thread on a forum. You might need to be the one to ask the question, because it hasn’t been asked before. Which leads into the more important point, way more important than just knowing how to google something:

A fundamental part of being any good at any of this is the ability to clearly define your problem.

This will not only make it easier to find answers to your questions, but it will make it easier for you to solve your own problems. The vast majority of the work is taking a nebulously-defined problem, breaking it down into solvable chunks, and then solving those chunks. Remember word problems in your math classes in high school? It’s like that, forever.

1. Pick a Language

I know this seems like a weird first step. How do you pick a programming language if you don’t know anything about programming? In reality it doesn’t matter very much which language you pick; what matters is that you pick a language and stick with it.

This advice I drop with personal experience. The list of languages I picked up and forgot is longer than the list of languages I use today. First was Ruby, when I was 11 or 12 and building games with RPG Maker XP. Then it was C, then C++, then JavaScript… the problem was, every time I started with a new language it was like starting over. This was because I didn’t stick around long enough to master the fundamentals. Once you get the fundamentals down, then moving languages is easy. But you’ve gotta stick around long enough to do that. That’s the hard part.

That said, if I were to start again today, I’d pick one of these and stick with them.

• C#: Developed by Microsoft. The tools are free, the documentation is extensive and detailed, and you can pretty much choose exactly how deep you want to dive here. The language and the tools have everything built-in to let you get started easily, and learn its inner workings at your own leisure. This is my favorite language, and my default when starting a new project.
• JavaScript: If you can use a web browser, you can write and run JavaScript. Nothing extra is needed to run this code, making it the easiest to just get up and running. As a bonus, you’ll never be out of a job if you can master this language.
• Python: Similar to JavaScript in a lot of ways, this still requires some setup before you can use it. Once set up, though, Python is another great language to start with, and perfect for building everything from small tasks to games to big web server applications.

Obviously, you should do your own research, but don’t get too deep in the weeds. Just pick a language, any language, and decide that it’s the language you’ll use to learn how to program. Some do come with a learning curve just because extra tooling might be needed to run them (C#, Python), so decide if you want to fiddle with installers or just get going (JavaScript).

2. Learn Your Fundamentals

Now it’s time to hunker down and start the real learning. I linked to some documentation for each language above, which is a great place to start.

From a bird’s-eye view, your learning path would cover:

• Data Types: These are the building blocks of programming, and are how your code is represented to you, the coder, and how it’s interpreted by the machine. It’s the difference between an integer (1), a decimal (1.0), and regular text ("1")—and how these can and can’t interact with each other.
• Operators: These are how you set and update your data. Like mathematical operations, they let you add things together, check for equality, and more.
• Conditions and Loops: “If-this-then-that” logic, or “for every item in this list” logic.
• Functions / Methods: Like formulas, or small mini-programs. If data types, operators, and conditions are water, rocks, and paste, then functions and methods are the bricks that make the foundation for a program. You put everything together into a method, then call that method from other code to do a predefined set of work. Like “2+2=4”.

Remember that Google is your friend, and there are countless resources on all of the above out there. The official documentation for the languages I posted above includes info on these terms, or the resources I will link to below will guide you through them in a more structured manner.

3. Dive a Little Deeper

This is where the Computer Science comes in: algorithms and data structures.

This is a big topic. Entire textbooks are written on just this alone. The important thing to remember is that every piece of code you write comes with its own complexity. Some code will perform better than other code, and many problems can be generalized, or abstracted, and solved with algorithms that some other smart people have already figured out. Like, what’s the best way to sort a list of items of a certain type?

Anyway, here are two specific places to start:

• Look up “Big O Notation” and how it relates to the speed or complexity of an algorithm. You don’t need to know specific algorithms to understand this. It’s a good primer on efficiency, and an important part of describing the complexity of a particular piece of software.
• You like video games? Look up “binary space partitions” and how they’re used to generate dungeons in roguelikes. Here’s a link to check out, without any code in it. This is a great example of taking a more generalized data structure / algorithm, and applying it to the specific problem of “how do I automatically generate dungeons for my video game?”

4. Make Something

As I stressed in my SQL post, if you don’t use it, you lose it. All this reading is worthless if you don’t do anything with it. It will just fall out of your head in six months and you’ll have to start over again.

Pick a project, any project. Find a small task you do that’s repetitive and might be automated and try to automate it. Go through this list of project ideas and work down it. Build a Pong clone, or a Breakout clone. Find a textbook and do the questions at the end of each chapter.

Start small, and work your way up to bigger things. Don’t overwhelm yourself. But keep going, keep building. It’s okay to just follow tutorials and copy code as long as you’re also thinking critically about what you’re copying and why it works—and better, how you might do things differently on your own. Go past the end of the tutorial. Keep going. It’s okay to get stuck, it’s okay to break things. That’s how you learn.

But keep going. Keep building and learning and growing.

5. Read

Maybe this should have been first. Or maybe it should replace everything above. Textbooks remain the single best method of distributing and acquiring knowledge. The good ones structure themselves in a logical and approachable way so that you can start out as ignorant as the day you were born, and finish as an adept.

The only downside is that technology moves at a fast pace, and textbooks for things like specific languages might be a little outdated by the time you find them. That’s okay, really. Most languages don’t change enough for it to matter, or you could use the book’s structure to set your pace and help you find more modern materials that are available elsewhere.

Or you could focus on books that aren’t about a particular language. Some of the best books on programming are more about how to approach the work, ways to think about code, and the “soft skills” many of us lack in the industry; that is, how to navigate people, culture, and politics. Here’s a good list of these books.

6. Further Resources

Okay, you’ve made it this far, but maybe everything above is still too vague to really get started. Here’s a list of free resources designed to get you going. Most of these are structure learning, like online classes, for you to do at your own pace.