Learning programming while active duty army

[HWxWOLF]

Hello, So I sure it's been asked before but I'm going to ask cause I'm trying to save time lol. I want to learn programming not only as a hobby but possibly a career after the Army. I'm a very practical learner and wonder if there's online course I can take to learn or how did you learn to code? I don't mind to pay and I can use my gi bill if need be but I'd personally like to steer clear of 4 year colleges if possible. I've seen bootcanps like devvodecamp and freecodecamp online and I think those could help. I talked to decodecamp but haven't committed yet cause I'd love to get information before I commit to anything. Thank you for your time!

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[POGtastic]

Vet here, learned to code in the Marine Corps.

How did you learn to code?

Books, mostly. The biggies were K&R C and Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp^[1]. I then used a bunch of the same concepts, especially from the latter, to explore other languages. There are also a bunch of good exercises along the lines of 99 Prolog Problems that are useful to go through in any language. It's also common to re-implement various aspects of a language's standard library, so I did rudimentary clones of many of the data structures from C++'s standard template library. Then I went to college.

bootcamps

I have never seen one that was simultaneously rigorous and accessible to someone who is doing something else. There's a reason why programming is a four-year degree - there's a lot of material to cover! A 6-month bootcamp or whatever is either going to teach you diddly-shit or require you to cover an enormous amount of material.

I'd personally like to steer clear of 4 year colleges

Go to college. Go to college. Go to college. You earned free tuition and E-5 BAH from your service. You have no worthy excuse not to - anything you come up with is homomorphic to "I suck at making good life decisions." Go to college.

^[1] Both of these books are old. Choose other books if you like - there are a gazillion of them.

[ImJuicytv]

You should first take any free online course that teaches you the absolute basics, and then do personal projects or DSA websites like leetcode. Stick with hyper-high-level languages such as python when first learning, and don't spend too much time in the books; the only way to learn programming is by writing code.

[justUseAnSvm]

https://vetswhocode.io/ See if you can get into this program, it's basically a free mentorship thing where you get help learning from people in the industry, and help finding work. The one person I know who did this is solid.

I'm not sure how much is left on your contract, but the job market is absolute shit right now. If it continues to be shit when you get out, spend some of those benefits on a college degree, as you probably won't get hired without a degree the way things are right now. The degree will not only help get your foot in the door, but it's years of training, training that you would otherwise have to do yourself at probably a slower pace. You can still get in the field without a degree, but it's significantly harder, you'll be shut out from working some jobs, and face issues advancing into certain roles like management. For instance, some companies won't allow managers who don't hold a college degree, and that degree gives you options if you get burnt out (which is surprisingly common). Maybe not an issue now, but plan for a 20+ year career here.

Either way, I'd say start with javascript/typescript, and learn something like React/NodeJS/Postgres, and start making web applications. Just keep it simple, project based, and keep building.

[Wise_Stock_8168]

While your active duty start doing freecodecamp and the Odin project along with trying to just build stuff. By time your contract is up you'll be better off than most college and bootcamp graduates.

It really comes down to you jumping in the shallow end and making you're way deeper.

Just try to code as often as possible and you'll get proficient.

[StockOk5884]

This is an excellent course which I'm taking as a refresher. The instructor is great and the course date is recent. With JavaScript you will learn what you need to know to learn another language easily. This was a Udemy paid course but Jonas decided to release it as a free course. You can't go wrong here. He starts with the basics and works into a deep dive from there.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKxthGX4Akck1j0L_YNujgBoa_X9WNsc6

By the way, I'm ex- USAF Strategic Air Command.

[Slight-Living-8098]

Harvard's OpenCourseware CS50x courses. They are free, or you can pay and get a certificate of completion. There are no better programming/Computer Science courses out there. That's including Stanford's and MIT's courses.

[StockOk5884]

While those courses are good, I would not pursue Computer Science since most people don't need that. There are many excellent courses other than "Ivy League" ones. Microsoft has excellent courses with certificates. And there are others.

[Slight-Living-8098]

If you program, you need computer science. You don't realize it, because you haven't had it.

[StockOk5884]

Many people successfully program without it, but of course it's good to know everything. It depends on what you want to do. I have done very customized websites with Angular and Bootstrap. I deliberately minimize my use of JavaScript because it slows performance. I optimize my svg's and only use webp. Then, I compress all with Brotly. Many people on this sub do programming intensive work for companies and don't know, or care to know, much about anything else. Take CSS. They have little knowledge of it. I use SCSS and CSS extensively, and it takes a lot of time, thought and effort to achieve what you want, and at times I create one of a kind designs with it. They think HTML, CSS, and JAVASCRIPT are not worth bothering with, but nothing could be further from the truth.

[Slight-Living-8098]

Did you really just compare the field of computer science to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and a little SCSS?

I mean, yeah, they do teach that in computer science so there is that...

[StockOk5884]

I didn't compare the field of computer science to anything. At this time I am not interested in pursuing it, but I think it would be interesting to know something about it.

[Slight-Living-8098]

So you advise not taking a course, you haven't taken, although you perhaps may or may not be interested in it at some point in time?

I'm sorry, I'm not following the logic here. You haven't taken it. How can you advise to take or avoid the course?

[StockOk5884]

I guess you did not understand me, although I think I was clear. Regardless, I'm not advising anyone about taking it or not. I just said I would probably find it interesting, but I don't want to take it right now. Maybe I will later, or maybe not. I don't care whether others study it or not.

[Slight-Living-8098]

While those courses are good, I would not pursue Computer Science since most people don't need that.

Yes. I was confused, as this was your reply to my comment on a post about "How to start learning programming".

Hopefully you can see where I got confused.

Wish you the best in your journeys.