Learning Programing. Where to Start? (14)
Hi ya'll,
I keep a contact with a fellow marketer who's in the same niche I am, and whenever I reach out to him about some problem I have (in regards to Optimization, tracking, database, some manual tasks), the response I get is "we have a script for that". LOL. This a precursor of what this thread is about.
I wanna learn Programing, where do I start from?
I wanna be able to master tracking and all about tracking, including API, URL, then things that are related to optimization like using TheOptimizer.
My fellow marketer also uses some databases for some extra scripts, so what do I learn in this case?
I am kinda less interested in front-end web-development although if I can learn that quickly why not.
And second: Later on I wanna transition to using programing to enter them into somethings that are related to building some actual physical softwares
like targeting laser rays at specific patterns on specific heat signatures from IR cams, what programming language do I need for that?
Thank you in advance!
Hello 
https://www.codecademy.com/ is a very popular source for newbie coders, take a look at it.
@twinaxe has been experimenting with some API stuff lately, I believe he was using Python language for this, right?
@jeremie knows quite a bit about the tech stuff, maybe he could drop a few tips here too
Learn Python.
You can use for all your web automation scripts in the Cloud (for example using Lambda functions in Amazon AWS), and it works well with hardware too, because there is a vast ecosystem of libraries to interact with physicall devices. You can buy a Raspberry Pi to test your scripts. Connect to a webcam to analyze images, create a mini alarm, control food delivery to your fishes (@matuloo 
)... Pick a project and start, not to stay in the theory.
Udemy.com has lots of great courses. Search for coupons to get the courses for 15/20 usd instead of paying full price.
I could automate both my aquarium and garden pond
Originally Posted by matuloo
I could automate both my aquarium and garden pond Free Code Camp, but that's more general everything.
For Python, I loved https://shop.learncodethehardway.org/ back when it was free (and Python 2, which I guess everyone uses 3 now?).
You're an affiliate so you'll find the free version anyway :P
I can only tell how I do it but that way works best for me.
First buy PyCharm Professional edition to have a great Python IDE.
It's extremely helpful and with just an editor like Sublime I would never get done what I get done with PyCharm.
Then you need an idea, without a real life idea what to code you will play around with boring example stuff like calculator or whatever.
When you have something that is really helpful and practical for your work it's much more motivating to work on it.
Then forget about courses, just start working on your project, go to w3schools for the Python basics and when you get stuck with something you just google it, mostly you will land on stack overflow, geeksforgeeks etc.
You can learn everything you need along the way, learning by doing.
That way you also don't lose time learning stuff that you will never use anyway.
Then I have folders with bookmarks for different things like Python general, PyMongo, Pandas, APIs so that I cna check stuff that I need more often again.
In my opinion it's not important to learn the stuff through a proper course or so.
It's much more important to have a good general understanding of coding syntax and logic.
When you have it you will know what to search for, if you don't have it you will probably have a hard time learning it even when you take a good course.
This is one of the things where I would say your brain is either made for it or not 
If you want to talk a bit more about it just let me know, I am happy about every additional coding excited user.
Have self tought me Python to an extend that allows me to solve my problems.
I found it best to start with an actual problem that is not too complex.
Let's say you want to download JSON data and put that into an XLS file.
For this problem (and many others) you find millions of solutions. You can just copy paste them into your IDE. The learning comes from trying to understand the code and tweaking it. In this regard it really helps to watch some tutorials or do some of the online courses which have been suggested here.
I wasted a lot of time by first trying to learn things out of a book or course and later trying to apply my "knowledge". The other way around works so much better (at least for me).
Few parts concerning IDE...
Pycharm is really awesome and has everything in it that you need. For the start the free community version will do. The professional one give you very nice extra tools and you won't need to search for plugins. If you like a leaner and more customized approach VS Code might be better and cheaper option. But you will have hard time to find the real good plugins.
Maybe one of these Linux issues but eventually I gave up and continued with PyCharm that worked eight away.
I also installed the free version first to get a first impression but as soon as I decided to go with PyCharm I bought the pro version because the additional features are absolutely worth it and it doesn't cost that much anyway.
Learn datatypes. Learn looping through arrays and dictionaries. Then you can start diving into your problem. Whichever language. Python is the easiest one to pick up. Highly readable. Python is also very popular in robotics software. It's probably the most logical choice for you, as the alternative is probably C/C++.
Python vs C++, python for beginners. No contest.
VS Code here. The choice really depends on your style. BBEdit (mac) / Notepad++ (windows) could be less confusing.
Also using VS Code. Allows me to work on HTML / CSS / JS / PHP / Python and markdown files with the same tool.
Originally Posted by twinaxe
I wasted a lot of time by first trying to learn things out of a book or course and later trying to apply my "knowledge". The other way around works so much better (at least for me).
Originally Posted by roiter123
I don´t want to learn how to code stupid things that I´ll never need for my work, I want to do useful things so instead of learning first and implement the knowledge then for work projects I rather come up with a work project first and learn everything I need along the way.
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