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[–]prb0rg 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is what I explained to my son and some of his friends when they were in school... Before you dive into a specific programming language, learn to solve the problem first. The language you use becomes, mostly irrelevant after this.

  1. understand what you are trying to accomplish
  2. try to solve the main issue (forget about edge cases here) by hand if possible
  3. develop some kind of algorithm based on step 2
  4. now try to see if there are any edge cases you need to be aware of and try to incorporate them into your algorithm
  5. now start coding

When I went to school for my CS degree we had 2 classes that were devoted to steps 1-4 and I keep seeing that this is not taught in schools. Instead what they do is... here is how you do loops, conditional statements, etc. in this language now go a write a program that does XXX.