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Discussion on: New to the coding world.

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Jim Burbridge

Greetings, and welcome to the wild world of Software Engineering.

Sublime is a good text editor, but it's never been my favorite. I use VSCode for my daily driver now, and before that I used a random jumble of other editors / IDEs (none of which I use anymore). I've written extensions for VSCode, which is not something I can say that I've done before.

Free code camp is a pretty solid resource for learning the web development world; I've never personally gone through it, but I have looked at it to help a friend of mine when he was learning so it gets my broadest stamp of approval (i.e. I can't speak for how good each granular part is, but on a whole it seems fine).

Java is not really used in games as far as I am aware outside of perhaps mobile games, but most games I see now tend to be built in some other game engine and ported over (Unity had this ability, unsure if they still do).

If you plan on staying in the web world, understanding the Javascript ecosystem (and how it pertains to Node.js) will be critical for creating websites.

Other than that, having also been younger learning programming myself, I would give you one bit of advice: always try to build something, even if you don't feel like you know how to do all of it at the start. Necessity is the mother of education, and I learned quite a bit by simply finding a problem I didn't know how to solve. DO NOT just build things that you know, 100%, that you can.

Otherwise Dev.to is a great place to come to for some broader discussions, and StackOverflow is a great place to ask for very specific code help (note: you should supply code to illustrate your attempt to solve the problem -- they do not take kindly to you simply asking for code that does something).

Reach out if you have any questions!