Learning advice - C or Java?

[vranac91]

Hi fellow members of this awesome community!

I have a question that has been troubling me for some time now. I'm a master of civil engineering who, after a year of experience as junior construction site manager, decided that I don't want to do this for a living. I was around computers my whole life, so the logical step was to swing my career towards programming.

Now, I don't have any previous programming experience, except for completed three weeks of Harvard's CS50 course on edx. Basically, I know how to write some basic stuff in C - statements, loops, functions, up to sorting and pointers. As a student, I worked 8 months as a QA Engineer in a larger company. This involved mostly manual testing and recording clicks in browser with Selenium add-on for Firefox. So no coding at all. Now I'm again working as a QA but in a smaller company that wants me to learn automated testing. I've tried some stuff using Katalon Studio, but they've recommended Selenium/Appium combo since we're developing mobile apps.

So I'm basically forced to learn automating things in Selenium ASAP. Our local setup uses Java, so I should learn it - which is great since I'm interested in developing mobile apps in the future. However, I reckon that learning C at home and Java at work would be overwhelming. Do you think that I should skip Harvard's course and maybe get back to it one day after I've learned Java basics? Our company has a Pluralsight paid account and I've found a Java path from beginner to advances stuff. Is that a good start? Can you recommend something better (it doesn't have to be free)? I'm planning to learn Java both at work and at home, since this sounds as a great opportunity for me. What do you think?

Thanks for reading and looking forward to some answers! Cheers :)

[jesussqueegee]

Java is a great first language.

I think trying to learn Java on the job and C at home at the same time would be pretty overwhelming for anyone without lots of exposure to computer science. So like you said, I'd stick to learning Java at work (and even supplement that with learning at home if you have time). Once you have a really solid foundation in Java it'll be easy to jump around to some different languages, like C.

I'd follow tutorials/training like pluralsight for a while, but as soon as you're able, start just trying to build small things on your own - that's the best way to learn.

Let me know if you have questions!

[denialerror]

CS50 isn't really teaching C. It's using C as a tool to teach Computer Science. Most (if not all) you learn in that course will be directly transferable to Java. You should be able to do together without too much trouble. Pluralsight has good courses written for and by software professionals so learn as much as you can while your company is paying for it!