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Discussion on: What suggestions would you put forward to someone who is a Beginner?

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Jacob Enders

What you do from here depends on what your goals are. I'll let you know what I personally did.

If you don't have any interest in doing this professionally, at least within the next couple years.... then just hammer away at whatever you find interesting. I had many years to burn because I started doing this in high school.

When I first finished a bunch of YouTube tutorials, I made ASCII battleship, Pong, an Android App arcade game, Asteroids, and probably 50 other mini projects that I scraped after working for a couple weeks on.

Back then I never focused on best practices, instead I would learn from my own failures, I would read hundreds of internet posts, and tutorial about why my code was bad. And compare other peoples solutions to what I had developed.

I do think it's really best to learn what NOT to do instead of what you SHOULD do. Because it gives you better perspective about why things are the way they are.

But of course, if you plan on getting a programming job this year. I don't recommend doing it this way because it's far more time consuming to build a bunch of projects just to learn why they suck lol. But I found it very fun to come up with my own solutions to problems, rather than being told what to do. It kept the projects, fun and engaging for me.