Choosing your goal

The goal for many people is to do their existing job more efficiently. Chapter 2 covered different ways coding could improve your ability to do your job across a variety of roles. For example, you may love your job in sales, and you want to analyze the large volumes of data that your company has on which product the customers use the most, so you can find similar customers and build a list of prospects to solicit. Gradually, as you increase your proficiency, other companies may ask you to consult for them and build some similar capabilities. The commitment and resources required for a gradual change like this are low and constant, because you are learning over a long period of time.

For others, the goal might be more dramatic. You may want a full career change in the next six to twelve months. The commitment and resources required to make this type of switch are significant, but employers are becoming more comfortable with self-taught programmers.

Making time to learn how to code

To achieve your goal it is important to understand how much time is required in total and how you will plan your learning. If your goal is to learn a tool or complete a task at work more efficiently, you may need only a day to a week of training, along with some practice, to start seeing results. Learning to code in a week or less to complete simple tasks is possible for many coding fields, including web development, data analysis, and database management.

To switch careers and be employable as a full-time developer requires between 700 to 1,000 hours. That sounds like a lot, but you can complete that in about ten weeks with intense practice, or in six months to one year with less commitment.

Completing 700 hours of learning in 10 weeks requires a full-time commitment. However, if you want to learn during the course of a year, you might be able to devote 15 hours per week to study while working full-time, depending on your job.

When learning introductory coding topics, which take 50 hours to complete, the time you spend can be more sporadic — an hour between meetings at work, an hour each weeknight at home, and several hours during the weekend. As the topics become more complex, you’ll need dedicated blocks of time for learning and for debugging.

Book your dedicated time in your calendar now so you can keep progressing even when holidays, vacations, and birthdays pop up.

Spending money to learn how to code

Learning how to code on your own is the cheapest option in terms of cash spent, though you’ll need more time to set up your system and troubleshoot issues that arise. The good news is that putting aside hardware costs, the software and learning resources are free or inexpensive. In addition, you’ll find a community of experts and people learning like you who want to share information and support each other.

Purchasing computer hardware

Computer hardware can be expensive, but options exist at a variety of price ranges. Here are some options when purchasing a computer to learn to code:

• Cheapest: Use your existing computer, whether PC or Macintosh. The software is usually harder to install on Windows-based systems than on computers running Linux, Unix, or Mac OS (which runs a version of Unix).

  For $89, Symple (at www.symplepc.com) sells a computer with a preinstalled Linux-based operating system and enough power to perform your coding tasks. You need to supply your own monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

• Cheap: Chromebook laptops (see Figure 9-1) are portable and light but powerful enough to run coding software. They run Google’s Chrome operating system and are designed to be used while connected to the Internet. You can’t install traditional Mac, PC, or Linux applications, but you can install extensions made for the Chrome browser. These laptops typically retail for $200, and are manufactured by major companies such as Acer, HP, and Samsung.

  Codestarter (at Codestarter.org), a nonprofit that provides laptops to kids learning to code, has publicly released the script to turn a Chromebook Acer C720 into a coding machine complete with modern programming languages such as Python, Ruby, and NodeJS. Use the script by visiting github.com/codestarterorg/ubuntu-chromebook-installer.

• Moderate: The computers in the previous categories are fine to learn with but are rarely used in professional development environments. The most popular computers in this category are $600 lightweight PCs called ultrabooks and made by Dell, Acer, and Asus, and the $900 MacBook Air. These laptops have high-resolution screens with sharp contrast and crisp colors, important features when coding website or data visualizations.
• Expensive: The standard machines used in professional development environments have at least a 21-inch resolution screen, 8 gigabytes of RAM, 500-megabyte hard drive, and 2GHz dual-core or quad-core processors. Some Windows PCs meet these specifications, but most popular among developers are the MacBook Pro laptops and the iMac desktop computers, both of which cost at least $2,000. Apple computers are popular in this category for several reasons:
  • Display: Apple’s retina display screen has such a high resolution that the individual pixels are imperceptible to the human eye at an average distance with normal vision. This high resolution gives Mac displays a strong advantage when doing visual work.
  • Hardware: Developers who use the Linux or Unix operating system often have to deal with hardware devices (such as graphics cards, sound cards, or USB ports) that don’t install or function properly. The Mac operating system, which runs a version of Unix, has few hardware issues because all parts are manufactured and tested by Apple.
  • Software: Mac computers are preinstalled with the most popular programming languages, including Python, Ruby, PHP, and Perl. In addition, for mobile apps, you can use a PC or a Mac to develop Android apps, but you can use only a Mac to develop apps for iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads.

When learning how to code, you likely don’t need the best or fastest computer. If you do decide to purchase a higher-end computer, remember that the majority of people using your programs won’t have a computer as fast or a monitor with as high-resolution as you. Developers who forget this create websites and visualizations that others find slow or difficult to read.

Using blogs and books

Traditionally, a self-learner used blog posts to dip a toe into a topic, and books to dive deeper into a programming language. Blogs highlight inspirational stories that document people’s journeys, and books serve as valuable reference tools. The following are some favorite blogs and books in each subject area:

• Front-end and back-end development:
  • blog.jenniferdewalt.com : An artist by trade, Jennifer Dewalt (see Figure 9-2) learned to code by building a different website every day for 180 days, writing a blog post about it, and posting the code publicly on GitHub. On day 52, she created an Etch a Sketch program; on day 97 she created a text-to-Braille converter.
  • joshuakemp.blogspot.com : Joshua Kemp, a blacksmith, seriously injured his hand while shoeing a horse. He decided to learn to code, and wrote about going from a blacksmith to a developer.
  • HTML and CSS by John Duckett: For front-end developers, this full-color book is the number-one programming book on Amazon and a good introduction to what you can do with HTML and CSS.

  • learncodethehardway.org : Zed Shaw has written two books for back-end developers titled Learn Ruby the Hard Way and Learn Python the Hard Way. Both, which are freely available online, provide instructions and real coding examples aimed at beginners.

    For a community-sourced list of all freely available, online programming books, visit http://github.com/vhf/free-programming-books. The list covers over 25 programming languages and environments, so focus first on the popular and easier languages such as HTML, CSS, Ruby, and Python.

• Mobile development:
  • app.itize.us : Half the challenge when creating a mobile app is cramming the functionality you need into a small mobile screen. Visit this site for a curated selection of the best-designed apps.
  • twotoasters.com/blogs/ideas : TwoToasters creates mobile apps for some of the largest brands in the country. They maintain an iOS and Android blog on industry news and programming tidbits.
  • The Swift Programming Language by Apple, Inc.: Apple recently released a new programming language, and new and experienced developers alike are learning how to use it. This free book, which can be downloaded from iTunes, is long but a good place to start.
• Data analytics:
  • Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte: Finding great insights is most powerful when you can communicate them effectively. This classic book has no code but shows the different ways data can be graphically displayed.
  • Python for Data Analysis by Wes McKinney: Data analysis always starts with cleaning, merging, and transforming your underlying data. This book shows you Python techniques to whip your data into shape so you can analyze it.
  • IBM Big Data Hub: Available at ibmbigdatahub.com/blogs , IBM’s blog has consistent coverage of big data trends, industry news, and the latest technologies.
• Search engine optimization:
  • Moz: Available at moz.com/learn/seo , this blog is the best place to go to start your SEO education. You’ll learn all the factors that influence search rankings.
  • cutroni.com : To track and measure the effectiveness of any SEO campaign, you need an analytics tool such as Google Analytics. Google’s Analytics Advocate blogs about cohort analysis, user identifiers, and other analytics-specific topics.
  • The Art of SEO by Enge et al: The authors have been doing SEO work for decades and provide general advice along with specific suggestions for updates made to search engine algorithms.

Learning from online websites

With the demand for coders so high, many companies have created websites with engaging and interactive experiences that are easier to complete than just reading a blog post or a book. Some sites gamify the experience, encouraging you to keep learning by earning points and badges. Most sites have community support, which can include discussion boards, live chat, or tutors to help when needed. The cost for these services varies per website; some are free and others charge a monthly or per-course fee.

When choosing a resource, check how much content is on the site, whether the materials are up-to-date, and the level of community engagement. Nothing beats having a strong online community to answer your questions quickly, and nothing is worse than spending hours trying to debug a problem with your code only to discover that the website you were using had a typo in the instructions.

Here are some favorite online websites in each subject area:

• Front-end and back-end development:
  • codecademy.com (free): Learn basic web programming languages to create complete websites from front end to back end (see Figure 9-3). You can start immediately with only a web browser; you don’t have to download or installing any software.
  • codeschool.com ($29/month): Initially, Code School became popular with its Rails for Zombies series, but the site also has a niche among intermediate developers. The site features video lessons with in-browser coding challenges for a wide range of programming topics and languages. There are also screencasts (recoded coding sessions) with guest speakers teaching various skills.

• teamtreehouse.com ($25 or $45/month): Treehouse has a slightly larger content library than Code School, and includes all the usual front-end and back-end courses along with mobile app courses for iOS and Android as well as business classes on how to freelance and market your app or business.

  Bento (bentobox.io) is a community-sourced curated listing of the best free resources for learning how to program and, most importantly, the order in which to take these topics to maximize your learning. The site has grown to include over 100 lessons on programming languages, frameworks, libraries, and APIs.

• Mobile development:
  • Stanford’s Developing iOS 8 Apps (free): Stanford’s School of Engineering has released on iTunes an online course with over 20 hours of instruction and slides so you can learn to code apps for iPhones and iPads. Go to itunes.apple.com/us/course/developing-ios-8-apps-swift .
  • Intro to iOS App Development by Udacity (free): Video lectures teach Swift programming by building an app that records your voice and then transforms it into Darth Vader or a chipmunk. Visit www.udacity.com/course/ud585 .
  • Android and Swift Immersive by Bitfountain ($150): These two separate courses each have over 300 videos on developing iOS and Android apps. Available at bitfountain.io .
• Data analytics:
  • datasciencemasters.org (free): This open-source data-science curriculum has curated free and paid online courses, books, and tutorials.
  • Introduction to Data Science (free): Hosted on Coursera (see Figure 9-4), and taught by the University of Washington, this online course covers introductory big data concepts, along with data analysis and visualization. Available at www.coursera.org/course/datasci .
  • datacamp.com (free to $25/month): This interactive online course teaches you R, a statistical programming language, in the browser. Courses include introductory lessons to advanced data manipulation and visualization using R and specialized libraries.

Find a curated list of 250 free online video courses across a variety of coding topics from universities such as Stanford, MIT, and Princeton by visiting Class Central, available at www.class-central.com/subject/cs .

Adding support with mentors

As you can see, there is no shortage of content or coding topics to learn. As you start your path down any one of these roads, you’ll have questions, get stuck, or just need encouragement. Although you are learning by yourself, you can find mentors to support you on your journey and help you make progress.

Mentoring can be expensive, but the cost depends on how much time and assistance you need. If you’re taking a Codecademy course or viewing a lecture on Coursera and need an hour or two of ad-hoc help occasionally, check out these hourly services to connect with a mentor:

• airpair.com : Over 2,000 expert developers are available to help you debug and review your code. Experts set their own rates, which range from $60 to $300 per hour.
• codementor.io : Experts in over 800 categories, including HTML, JavaScript, and Ruby, connect with you instantly for one-on-one help. Rates start at $10 for a 15-minute session, and the website displays experts who are online and available to help. (See Figure 9-5.)
• hackhands.com : Users pay $1 per minute for on-demand help across a variety of programming languages. After you connect to an expert, you have an initial 5-minute grace period at no charge to assess whether the expert is the right person to assist with your problem.

You may want to occasionally ask for help from mentoring sites such as AirPair. Expert-led coding instruction typically involves a curriculum along with mentor check-ins, office hours, a discussion group, and live chat. These fuller and more supported services work well if you have some money to spend on your coding education but don’t want to pay $10,000 for a high-intensity coding boot camp (discussed in Chapter 10).

Some options for mentor-led coding instruction include the following:

• thinkful.com : Along with courses in web development, design, data science, iOS, and Android programming, Thinkful matches you with a mentor for weekly 45-minute sessions and offers open office hours. Students pay $500 per month, and typically finish one subject in three months.
• careerfoundry.com : Similar to Thinkful but with fewer classes, CareerFoundry has a custom curriculum for web development and design, along with weekly mentor sessions and a group chat. The course includes 12 mentor sessions and costs $1,680.
• bloc.io : Bloc has programs in web and mobile development as well as design. The fee is $4,500 per course and includes 36 mentor sessions over 12 to 36 weeks.

Pick a language, any language

As a novice coder, you may not be sure where to start. Should you learn Python, Java, Swift, Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript at the same time or sequentially? Or should you just choose a few?

If you’ve never programmed before, I recommend learning a language used to create web pages, because it’s easy to get started and publish work for others to see. Start with HTML and CSS. These are markup languages, which are the easiest to learn. You put content on a web page with HTML, and style that content with CSS.

After you understand some of the basics of presenting content, learn a programming language to manipulate that content. Keep in mind that you don’t need to learn every programming language — JavaScript, which adds interactivity to a web page, is a common starting point for beginners, along with either Ruby or Python, which add advanced features such as user accounts and logins.

Learning to code is similar to learning to drive a car. When you first learned to drive, you probably didn’t worry too much about the type of car you were driving. After passing the driving test, you could operate just about any car, even one you hadn’t driven before, because you knew to look for the ignition, accelerator, and brake. Learning a programming language works the same way: After you learn one language, you know what to look for, and learning and using another language becomes easier. Just start somewhere!

Define a goal

To stay motivated, create a concrete, well-defined goal. You can choose any goal you like, but make sure it’s something you would be excited to accomplish. Good goals for beginners include the following:

• Build your coding vocabulary so you can understand what developers or designers say in meetings at work.
• Create a small website — consisting of one to four different pages — for yourself, a business, or a group.
• Analyze a public data set that is too large for Excel (such as all the subway riders or cab riders in New York) and create one simple graph. This type of data is freely available and low-stakes, and you can check your work against blog posts written by others who have used the same data set.

Tilt the odds in your favor by making your goal SMART. You’re more likely to accomplish any goal that is specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound.

You can start practicing by doing small coding tasks, such as bolding a headline. At first, you may feel disconnected from your goal. But as you start to piece together individual coding skills, you’ll see a path towards accomplishing your goal.

It can be difficult to know whether your goal is easy and attainable or too hard. Use a search engine to type your goal with tutorial at the end. If you can’t find any short and easy-to-read tutorials on the subject, try choosing another goal.

Google is a coder’s best friend

At some point, you’ll get stuck — your program won’t run, or it runs but returns incorrect results. Professional developers face these same problems. Developers constantly use the Google search engine to research general questions on how to code a feature or specific questions on syntax for a command or a tag. For example, imagine that a few months from now, you need to add an image to a website. You remember that HTML has a tag to insert images on a website, but you don’t recall the syntax. To quickly and efficiently find the answer, follow these steps:

1. Go to www.google.com.

2. Search for HTML image syntax.

   The programming language, the intended command, and the word syntax should be sufficient to find a good set of resources.

3. Review trusted websites for answers.

   For many coding questions you’ll likely see the following domain names in the top ten search results:

   • www.w3schools.com is one of the best resources for beginners who want to find basic information on developing web pages.
   • https://developer.mozilla.org is a crowd-sourced documentation and tutorial site for developing web pages. Its documentation is accurate, although some content is not beginner friendly.
   • http://stackexchange.com and http://stackoverflow.com are crowd-sourced discussion sites where developers can ask and answer questions about a variety of coding topics. You can find information on everything from front-end and back-end web development to data analysis and operating systems.

You can use this same process to research questions in other coding languages, or to find code examples from other developers who are building programs similar to yours.

Zap those bugs

While you’re doing all this coding you will inevitably create errors, commonly referred to as bugs. There are three types of errors:

• Syntax errors occur when you write invalid code that the computer doesn’t understand. For example, in CSS, you write color: blue; to change the font color of text. If you wrote font-color: blue; instead, you’d generate a syntax error because font-color is an invalid property.
• Semantic errors occur when you write valid code that has an unintended effect. For example, trying to divide a number by zero is a semantic error in JavaScript.
• Logic or design errors occur when you write valid code that has the intended effect, but the code produces the wrong result. For example, in JavaScript, converting miles to feet using var miles = 4000 * feet is a logic error. Although the code is written correctly and does what the programmer wants it to do, it still produces the wrong answer because a mile consists of 5,280 feet, not 4,000.

Some programming languages such as HTML or CSS code work even in the presence of syntax errors. However, in other programming languages, such as JavaScript, code with syntax errors won’t run.

The best way to find and eliminate bugs is to first check your code syntax and then check the logic. Review your code line by line, and if you still can’t find the error, ask another person to take a look at your code, or post it on an online community forum such as http://stackoverflow.com.