Month: June 2018

Exercises for Programmers, book review

exercises-for-programmers-Book_Cover

Published on: 15.06.2018

Number of pages: 118
Written by: Brian P. Hogan
Publish by: The Pragmatic Bookshelf

Conclusion
Book has good (real life) exercises that can be applied to learn a programing language.

Review
This book will not teach you programming but have 57 exercises that you can do in any language.

Each exercise has few additional challenges, so there is enough material for practice.

The only way to learn new programming langue(or your fist) is to make something concrete and this book can provide that.

Flowcharts are also shown in the book, I think that is cool.
Today flowcharts are mostly forgotten but are useful to know.

If you are not experienced programme (I do have 15+ years of development) my suggestion is to first solve an exercise by any means necessary and after you can do it with constraints and lastly also challenges from the book.

If some exercise is too hard (you have spent few hours and still no progress) just go to next one.
You will have more motivation to learn if it is fun and not dreadful.
After you finish some other exercises and get more experience, you can come back to old ones.

The best part about exercises in this book is that they are pretty close to real life programming, so you are not wasting your time (like on Codility) solving some problems that you will never encounter in real life software development.

My solutions can be found at https://github.com/sasa-buklijas/57-challenges-to-develop-your-coding-skills/.

What programming language should you learn?

Published on: 01.06.2018

This is written for persons that do not know any programing language and they are thinking what programing language they should learn first.

Altho, I think that reasoning behind decisions in this article can help you with choosing your next programing language also.

If you want to do something, first know why you want to do it

What are you trying to accomplish?

Same is with learning programming language.

I have listed few main reasons why persons want to learn a programing language:

  • get a job (on-site or freelance)
  • make some software app/website/web app
  • just to learn to do programming

I want to learn programming to get a job

Programming jobs (and salaries) are location dependent, due to this reason do research which programming languages job are available in your area.

If you plan to move/migrate do same for that area.

Check the local programming jobs listing to get a clue.

It is good to visit local programming meetups, if you plan to be a professional software developer start on your networking also.

Meetups are also a good way to see who is hiring.

If you plan to do freelance then you are not location depended.

What, I would argue, is even making thing more difficult, because you do not have location constraint.

Anyway do cost/benefit analysis and pick some language that makes sense according to your own constraints.

I want to learn programming to make software

You want to make some software (desktop app, website, web app, mobile app, etc).

You could pay profession to do it for you, but for some reason (eg. you are still in high-school, etc) you want to do it by your self.

Do research and find out what programming language is best for software that you plan to build.

I personally optimize for time to market.

If you plan to make a web app, there is no reason for you to learn C++, believe me, there is not.

Currently, in the year 2018, there are already known programming languages (tools) for most of the use cases.

But you also need to be careful, because most software developers will suggest programming languages that they know.

So, do not ask just one person but at least few dozens.

And always ask them what is the reasoning behind their decision.

I want to learn programming just to know how to programme

You do not want a job, you have no idea what to make with programming, you just want to learn programming.

Then you can pick any language, altho my suggestion is to pick something that does have some real-life usage and it is not complicated for beginners.

My humble suggestion is to choose Python “… is easy for beginners, practical for professionals, and exciting for hackers …” from Fluent Python.

Conclusion

Know what are you trying to accomplish and pick programing language for that purpose.