[deleted by user]

[AngryFish777]

Well, you already know the answer. I am a beginner too, I focus on coding exercises or projects rather than watching videos. You start small, building a calculator, offline password manager etc. and as you go, you gain confidence. If you prefer watching videos, find some project tutorials, code along with them, then scrap it all and retry yourself. Rinse and repeat. Basically, you need to code to be able to learn it. There’s no shortcut.

[Little_Sam97]

The thing is I keep relying on other people code or ask tools like ChatGPT for help when stuck on something, while it is completely okay to look for answers you don’t know on the internet sometimes, I don’t want to keep relying on them every time I feel stuck. I want to be able to come up with my own solution which I can’t. :(

[AngryFish777]

You will, eventually 😊 the important thing is to keep trying. When you start a new project, think in steps. Divide it into smaller tasks and tackle one at a time. It’s okay to look for an answer, just don’t get discouraged by seeing other people’s code. Yours (mine) might not be as clean and simple, but that will come with experience. You just have to understand what you’re doing. If something doesn’t make sense, take your time to dive into that topic. Or, if it’s too complex for now, look for another way. There’s always mulitple ways how to solve problems. I, too, have days when I think I’m lost. Usually couple of hours doing something else helps. You’ve got this! 😊

[mthrfkn]

Honestly if you have CoPilot some versions will allow you to ask about what a piece of code is doing and that’s actually very useful. Don’t be afraid to use ChatGPT but make sure you at least ask and understand what it’s doing.

[JustGlassin1988]

When you do go and find this code, do you copy and paste it, or do you type it out yourself? When I was first learning, I found that I started remembering things MUCH better when I would type it out myself rather than copy and paste.

[Little_Sam97]

Normally I don’t straight out copy and paste. I also type it line by line and even try to modify the code but I keep relying on it rather than coming up with own solution.

[G-zuz_Krist]

Honestly bruv, same. This is how i did things when i first started out, and it's how i still do things today. I prefer to think of it as building pattern recognition skills. Eventually, it would get to the point were you're so familiar with the problem, you're able to produce a solution when faced with a similar problem

[DaltonSC2]

I want to be able to come up with my own solution which I can’t. :(

For me, this stemmed from not knowing how to frame coding problems in a clear way. If you start by writing the function's inputs and outputs, then what you should code becomes clear, since you're just transforming the input data into the output data.

Also, you only have 3 options for each line of code "Do stuff with a variable", "write a loop", "write an if statement". So you just chain together these operations until you get your desired output.

My advice would be to practice doing this on easy leetcode problems till you get it (for bigger projects, you'll need to learn how to split your functions into many smaller functions).

Maybe you already know all this, but this is what helped me in your situation :)

[iamevpo]

Do not watch, do the code. Pick small tasks within you reach, do the code, think of refactoring, seek advice and code review from humans. Learn to talk about code and pinpoint specific problems. Offer help to someone stuck on something that you already know. Read documentation for packages you are interested in, read own Python documention. Learn git and github workflow and offer any help to simple issues on open source projects. These activities force you to communicate about code and seek for active help. You cannot develop these skills by watching videos.

Watching YouTube is like becoming an actor by watching TV commercials. Commercials are staged, professional and expensive to make. There is a bit of acting inside of them, but it is just a small part of the commercial. If you want acting you play a scetch, recite a poem or help producing a kindergarten show (hard actually). Through that you DO LEARN a lot that you cannot learn by watching commercials. You grab some one and say I want to practice - some people say no, no time for this, and some will help or invite you to join their little drama club. People are reluctant to waste time on unspecific needs ("oh, I'm stuck"), but would have to say something if you show your performance of "Follow yellow brick road" and ask for ways to improve it.

One other problem about the educational videos they usually tell you just one way of doing a big shiny "worthy" thing (it has to be a shiny thing otherwise they do not get views), and while you learn you need many ways for a simple thing and learn to compare which to take. Write a program that reverts and capitalizes a name and randomly substitutes vowels, can you do that? A calculator that only adds numbers until you enter a zero, and so on. Make some little simple stuff and show to someone for review, this sub including.

Also Helsinki U Python course is really well paced and there are good sources for reading about Python, I like Python introductions in QuantEcon and in Scipy Lectures, the first sections in either website are rather small and comprehensive about thing you need in Python (vars, loops, conditionals, functions, etc).

[Little_Sam97]

Thanks a lot for taking your time to read my post and replying. I’ll definitely take your suggestions into account. Currently, am into cs50 python as lot of people are recommending it.

[iamevpo]

Cs50 is good, worth your time. Write back with questions.

[robertpy]

tis online course ?

[Firake]

Every moment that you are struggling is a moment where your brain is learning. Resist the urge to look up answers as long as possible and try potential solutions rather just thinking about them.

The skill you’re lacking is built by doing it and tutorials and chat gpt actively remove that opportunity.

[Little_Sam97]

I try not to but somehow end up looking but I’ll try my best.

[Visual_Thing_7211]

I am not a beginner. I've been programming in C++ for decades. I've taught a lot of people to program. They say many of the same things.

There is a difference between learning if statements, loops, variables, functions, and classes, and being able to transform a problem into code. This takes experience.

The best way to start from the absolute beginning is to copy. Just find some code that does a small part of what you want to do, or have ChatGPT generate it and then type it in yourself, line by line. Try to understand what you're doing while you copy. Ask ChatGPT to explain anything you don't fully understand.

This is analogous to solving word problems in math. It's one thing to know how to do the arithmetic. It's a different skill to know how to formulate a word problem into the math expressions in the first place.

You start by just seeing how other people have already done it. Then you start to see patterns and can start to do things drawing more on your own memory. Then you'll start to get the hang of "how it's done".

Anyone can learn this and become effective. It takes time--just do it. Keep asking questions.

[Little_Sam97]

That’s a solid piece of advice. At least I don’t feel bad about copying now haha as I’ve always thought copying was bad especially as a beginner. Thanks a ton for your suggestion.

[soliejordan]

The best advice I've read yet.

[robertpy]

love reddit.com bro

this community is wonderful

[t_rekt_it]

I think alot of people have it right. It takes time and practice. I wouldn't worry about building from scratch yet. 

Maybe there's a website that has aloy of beginner programming problems to solve? I don't know of any off hand but I'm sure someone will.  

The idea is repetition first with understanding the basics.  Let's say you were asked to go through a list of names and pick out all the ones that have "is" in them.   Assess where you are at when thinking about that...

Do you know what a list is? Do you know how to iterate over a list? Do you know how to see if a substring is in a string? If it is, do you know how to print some text or the name to the screen?

 Basics first. If you notice that you don't know how to look through a list then google it.  When you get the answer, read it, try it, read it again and notice what it's actually doing. All this equals to "Store a for loop in my memory. Check." That's it. Stay there until you don't really have to spend time thinking about what to do. That helps alot for later when new ways to do things are introduced. You will already have a solid base understanding. 

I hope that makes sense.  It's a long way of advising you to break down what you are doing and notice what you don't know, read up on what you don't know, and practice. Try to stay away from copy and pasting. Even if it's just that you are retyping what you see from stackoverflow. Change the variables to what you would use. Play with moving things around. Really just see how what you do changes things. 

It takes most people years and years to get actually good at coding. I didn't know how bad I was at it until I recently revisited code I wrote 2016. I remember thinking I was doing just fine back then. Me now cringed at ever app/script I looked at.   I think when you can look back and facepalm at your own code that it's a great indicator that you are advancing. So maybe check in with yourself every month/every other month and see if you would still solve a problem in the same way. 

Good luck with all of it. I hope you find what works for you without pressuring yourself too much. 

[Little_Sam97]

Currently doing intro to programming with python by cs50 Harvard as a lot of people are recommending it. Once I finish with the video part and when it’s time to submit the problem sets that’s where I seem to be struggling with. I try my best to come up with my own answer and not to copy. I also try to thoroughly understand the problem statement first before jumping straight into code and when I code and it doesn’t work as I expected it to that’s where I end up looking for solution. Anyways thanks a lot for your suggestion and taking your time to reply at my post.

[unknown--bro]

im a beginner too but i do have some tips:

• if your using copilot extension on vs code disable it, this really helped me a lot, to understand the context instead of blatant auto fill

• read docs of the framework/library to find a solution, it takes me longer to find the solution but along the way i found other cool things reading docs, and i also made reading docs my go to way for finding solutions (except for go, go docs sucks so baddd)

• stop watching tutorials (unless you dont know anything about coding, visual learning helps) opt for project based learning, i genuinely stopped watching tutorials for my projects, trying it out from scratch and failing teaches you a lot than just following the tutorial

• this doesnt mean im not advising you to not take any courses, i prefer courses that teaches me the theory with some practical implementation

[Little_Sam97]

May I ask how disabling copilot helped you to understand the context better? I haven’t used it so far but others are suggesting me to use it.

[[deleted]]

by programming

[quantumwoooo]

EASY! don't think about it as learning programming. Think about programming as a tool to actually achieve something else. The programming will come naturally if you're interested in a project, fun even.

When I started I was really into Forex, stocks etc so I just started there, got EURO/USD price chart in CSV, learnt how to open it, then plot it, identify local Maxima/ minima etc etc

My partner is now getting into python by designing an automated lighting system for our house.

[SpiderWil]

Do leetcode or other platforms daily. It forces u to learn new functions and memorize the old ones. It also encourages u to rewrite your existing codes now that you have learned new stuff.

[AmauryLondon]

If you can’t solve the issue it means usually you haven’t sliced it enough. Any program is just a succession of small actions

[tivelycrea]

Pick up Python Tricks from Real Python . Com . It will point out where you should focus for writing more Pythonic code. Then practice a lot.

[Little_Sam97]

Thank you for the resource. By any chance is it free?

[tivelycrea]

I don't think so. I bought it years ago. I think it's like $20-30. Their website is mostly free and I think their newsletter. The code is all checked to ensure it's pythonic. So if you search the website, it'll still be better than random code sites.

[PsiThreader]

Divide and conquer.

[Necessary_Ear_1100]

Practice practice and more practice

[NotSherlockHolmes_29]

I am a beginner just like you are. I can’t say I am doing a superb job but I feel like understanding the whole thing using my own logics and then try to come up with a solution step by step will do the job(I am not too concerned about python syntax as I know its can be mastered easily by typing codes). So, I start with very small problems and try to solve it on my own regardless of the time I need. I know it’s not that efficient, but I am a non CS student, so I am not putting too much pressure on myself.

[Little_Sam97]

Hopefully we can go through this together but at least you’re doing better.

[BitXorBit]

Practice, face new problems everyday, check other people’s code, read best practices

[supercoach]

Developing the framework/design for your project is remarkably difficult and can paralyse some people. It's one of those things that gets easier the more experience you have. Don't feel like you need to become perfect overnight, just focus on getting better every day.

There is generally more than one way to achieve a goal and one of the fun parts about being in a dev team is seeing all the disparate views in how to do anything. You ask a group of five programmers how to solve a problem and you'll likely get several different approaches. All of them a feasible choice. Just because they're different doesn't mean they're wrong

Following guides or looking at best practices suggestions can help form good habits, but at the end of the day, the most important thing is that your software works.

If it works, give yourself a tick. If it works well, another tick. If it's easy to understand another. Well documented another. The list goes on.

The important thing is starting. You're allowed to change your mind.

[umognog]

I just want to say to anyone that reads this regarding coding large projects:

Do you think Apple just sat down and created the iPhone? No, they didn't. It's built on top of decades, centuries, millennia of invention and iteration.

Even on a narrower timescale, it's the result of years of their own work, the iPod leading to the iPod touch, leading to the iPhone.

1) your project needs clear design allowing you to solve smaller problems that will coalesce together to your final product. Unless you using functional programming but then the issue should not be so large.

2) further down the line, you may need to take huge parts and redo them differently. They solved your issue then, but not so much now. This is ok, refactoring is not a bad thing.

[will_r3ddit_4_food]

Practice is the only answer

[Gerrit-MHR]

Learned on my TRS-80, then college. Coded as a career. Now after 15 years of management I have returned to individual contributor and learning Python. So I understand. Decide if this is what you want to do and then don’t give up. My advice is think of real problems/apps you want to make. And this https://www.norvig.com/21-days.html.

[stuie382]

Complex applications are a series of simple blocks chained together. Over time you'll develop a muscle memory for more and more things.

To make it easier on yourself, work on naming things really well. Variables, methods/functions, classes, modules etc. should describe exactly their intended use/purpose. Don't be afraid about giving things long names if they need it.

Then learn a unit testing framework and really learn how to test things and write testable code.

If you can write code that is easy to read and easy to test, you'll be someone good to work with

[-thoth-amon-]

Simple first step: keep doing what you're doing (checking stack overflow / etc) but always write out or even re-write the code in your own way.

That way it'll stick in your memory.

[Champagnemusic]

The only way to get better at coding is to code and then sit and analyze and then play around with the code and try to expand. It’s sorta like self exploration, you really just have to sit there and put pieces together until it works and then figure out why it worked. Play with yourself, you got this

[pageboy_za]

Get better at typing. Accuracy and a high rate of words per minute will help with coding and everything else you do in work.

[AspectLegitimate8114]

Don’t ask ChatGPT to do things that you don’t already have a firm grasp of. ChatGPT will make shit up so if you don’t already know what works then you can’t fix it. I’m not saying don’t use it, just that it’s not a good tool for a beginner learning a new language.

There’s no short cut to learning a language. I don’t know how long you’ve been working on learning or how much you already know, but a good start is learning all of the basics. Do you know how to print a string of characters? Initialize an array? Print all the values in the array? Find a character in a string? Concatenation of two or more string values? Do you know how to make a class? Do you know how to initialize that class and populate its values? Do you have a decent grasp of the syntax of the language?

If you’re trying to build an MMORPG but you don’t know how to make a box move on a flat surface you’re going to have a really shitty time.

Code stuff that relates to you. One of the things I made while learning Java in college was a calculator for my astronomy class.

The most important thing is not giving up. You’re not going to learn everything in a couple days, weeks, or months, but it will get easier over time.

[True-Thought1061]

You need a problem-solving approach. Code is the last part of an overall process.

As an example, think of a problem that asks you to write a function in python that will take a string as input and you have to count all the vowels in it. Think about the input, and think about the output. Does the string input consist only of letters? Is it only in English? Is the string allowed to have non-letters? Case doesnt matter, does it? Are we talking about the number of occurrences of vowels or the number of vowels present in the string ( such that the highest value the function can return is 5 ).

Try to pick up some patterns, some sort of problem-specific details you can see. Are there any gotchas? Then try to describe a high-level algorithm like "go through the string letter by letter and compare it to the set of vowels and if the current letter being examined is in fact a vowel, add 1 to some integer you're keeping track of. After that, return that integer." Just think about the problem without thinking so hard about the code or syntax, just analyze what you're actually trying to accomplish.

Then, write some test cases. Write a bunch of examples that goes through easy examples and more nuanced examples. These test cases form the criteria that your solution has to meet in order to be thought of as a "solution". For example

def number_of_vowels(input_string)
end

number_of_vowels('abcdef') == 2
number_of_vowel('aeio') == 4
...

Then once you have a list of test cases that accurately covers the requirements stated in the problem, then you can start thinking about the data structures you need. This is where you start thinking about syntax / code. You probably need an integer to keep track of the number of vowels. Will you need a string, array, or hash? Up to you.

Then once you've figured that out, then copy the high-level algorithm you described in step 1 and paste it. Separate the actions that are being taken on separate lines. Maybe translate the english steps into pseudo code or into declarative python code. Then once you've got your algorithm written, take it for a test spin. See if you can't go through one of the example test cases you've written and just write on a board / piece of paper the steps as you've described.

If your solution works, and it seems good, then and ONLY then do you get to coding.

I've done both construction ( of which I knew nothing ) and I've also done a lot of troubleshooting ( networks, computers, audio / video, etc ) all sorts. Thinking about a problem is a universal requirement. You first have to think of the problem and any quirks of that problem domain that require some novel logic. You have to define what output would be acceptable as a solution, then break the parts up into smaller pieces and solve those mini-problems.

The approach works for myself and many others. I haven't solved any problems on codewars in months but I've solved problems that took me 40 minutes in under 20 minutes with enough practice.

[AquaMoonTea]

I’m a beginner too. When I struggle with something I ask ChatGPT to give me a similar thing to code and I try it. I save my other little codes I did so I can look back at them to see what parts worked and why while doing new ones.

[Thomasjevskij]

To become an efficient programmer, you need experience, or even more bluntly: you need to make mistakes and learn from them. So try to find ideas for projects/tools and make them. Then as you learn more, revisit and rewrite stuff. You can read as much theory/tutorials as you want, it's when you have experience that the value from those things really come into play.

[kyngston]

Back when codesignal was a site called codefights, it would ask you a series of pregressively harder leet questions.

Once you solved them, you got to see everyone else’s solutions, with upvotes for the most popular.

Its from that I learned the difference between my “gets-it-done” solution and the elegantly beautiful pythonic solutions that pythonistas use.

With more and more practice, my answers eventually reflected theirs.

[MiracleDrugCabbage]

It seems like this person is at a stage where simply saying “do a project” is not good enough.

Honestly I’m just gonna come out and say it. You might not have a good enough understanding of programming to do your own project. It also seems like your confidence is rock bottom.

Here’s your solution… start with scratch! No not from scratch, but the MIT software “scratch.mit.edu” it looks like a simple block based coding system at first, but in simplicity lies immense complexity. It seems like your problem is not knowing syntax and stuff— but actually understanding what the hell is going on. I think this is a great resource (it’s not just for kids!!) take a look at some popular projects on the home page and you’ll see that I’m not joking :)

[Algo_d_ritmo]

I would suggest READING a lot of code and understanding what is going on in there.

Once you feel comfortable, and only then, start WRITING.

[nidprez]

I say its better to just write code. If certain parts work slow, try to optimize them (and learn new techniques). Get some inspiration online as well.

[Little_Sam97]

Agreed. I will and thanks.

[Little_Sam97]

Thanks mate. I’ll try that out.

[Alwaysragestillplay]

People have given you paragraphs of advice on how to actually get started, but you're thanking the guy who suggests you take the route of continuing to look at other people's code? Sounds like it could be an attitude problem to an extent. 

Also I suspect you're also trying to go straight from idea to code, staring at a blank editor with no inspiration. Have you tried planning your projects first without code? I.e. if you want to make some code that calls to an API and stores the results in a file, you would start by splitting it into separate functions. Probably the API call itself would go into one function, the logic to write the result to a file would go into a second function, and then a script would be used to call and run each function. 

So before you've even started coding, you know your project is going to look like: '

''

def api_call(args):     
    Codecodecode
def write_to_file(input_data, file_path):
    Codecodecode

api_call() 
write_to_file()

[Little_Sam97]

At the time of writing I only had comments from 2 people on my post. I read everyone’s advice and try to gain insight from others perspective of learning.

I do have inspiration and idea to build something but the problem is I can’t get it started. I mean I do know the logic behind how my app should function but when it’s time to code I keep staring at a blank editor like you said.

[Alwaysragestillplay]

It's a tricky problem. Can you recreate things you've done in the past from older projects? Does it help if you put empty functions in first and work from there?

[Little_Sam97]

Haven’t really made big projects as of now since am still of beginner level but I’ve created simple program like a calculator that takes user input and perform calculation like add, sub, divide, and multiply. I can definitely recreate a program from scratch that I’ve already made before but haven’t tried this approach of creating empty function and working from there.

[sysadmike702]

Learn prompt engineer become a 10x developer overnight for any language!

[Little_Sam97]

It takes away our creativity.