My top tip - it's what helped me the most when I was learning my trade - is to learn by looking at and fixing other peoples' code. I got started in programming as a job back in the mid 90s when we couldn't find any software to do exactly what we wanted at work. I'd done a bit of programming before as a child, so volunteered to see what I could do. I found stuff that did almost what we needed, and modified it to do exactly what we needed. In retrospect the changes I made were trivial, but I learned so much by puzzling out what the existing code did and finding where I needed to make changes. And along the way I learned C and perl.
These days there's a lot more projects out there that make their code available, of course, and most welcome contributions from new people. Some will even have tickets that they have marked as being especially suitable for new contributors and people available to help you get started.
Good ways to get started with a project might not involve writing any end-user code. A lot of projects out there need better documentation of internals (ie read what's there and figure out what it does so that people who come along later don't have to figure it all out again) or need better tests (which are code, but not end-user code) to prove that the code performs correctly.
I will definitely look into that. I do learn better by doing and figuring out how something works (or doesn't work). This is awesome advice. Thank you so much David!
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My top tip - it's what helped me the most when I was learning my trade - is to learn by looking at and fixing other peoples' code. I got started in programming as a job back in the mid 90s when we couldn't find any software to do exactly what we wanted at work. I'd done a bit of programming before as a child, so volunteered to see what I could do. I found stuff that did almost what we needed, and modified it to do exactly what we needed. In retrospect the changes I made were trivial, but I learned so much by puzzling out what the existing code did and finding where I needed to make changes. And along the way I learned C and perl.
These days there's a lot more projects out there that make their code available, of course, and most welcome contributions from new people. Some will even have tickets that they have marked as being especially suitable for new contributors and people available to help you get started.
Good ways to get started with a project might not involve writing any end-user code. A lot of projects out there need better documentation of internals (ie read what's there and figure out what it does so that people who come along later don't have to figure it all out again) or need better tests (which are code, but not end-user code) to prove that the code performs correctly.
I will definitely look into that. I do learn better by doing and figuring out how something works (or doesn't work). This is awesome advice. Thank you so much David!