Hi, I'm Michael Mistretta, a student passionate about technology, photography, and design. Welcome to my online home where I write about technology, reviews, and my thoughts and opinions on technology-related matters. 
I want to learn to code.
That’s right. I want to learn how to code things. Websites. Applications. Scripts. There are many different languages that I would like to code. I want to learn PHP, Ruby on Rails, AppleScript, and Objective-C. At the moment, I only know a limited amount of HTML. That is the extent of my coding knowledge. The problem is, I don’t know where to start. That is why I am asking your help. Where does one go to begin to learn coding?
Are there books or tutorials or walkthroughs that can take a beginner through the paces? Is there a certain method that you recommend? What language is the best to begin with? I really am clueless. I look at people all around me that are able to do so much through coding, and I want to learn. Where do I start?
I’d start with a scripting language, then work my way into the lower-level languages.
Comment by River Jiang — January 17, 2008 @ 10:46 pm
I started off with books, they can be really helpful and have tons of great example code pieces. Another really helpful place, is using the “View Source Code” in your browser. Just looking at other peoples code to try and figure out how to do something can be extremely helpful. PHP is more complicated then most, and I don’t know that yet, but HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are easy to learn. Also, AppleScript was where I started for apps in XCode. It’s very English like and can help you get the basics of XCode down as well when you make your first app. Basically, you need to teach yourself. Start with the basics like if statements, loops, etc and then all languages are the same pretty much except for their syntax. Hope this helps!
Josh
Comment by Josh Holat — January 17, 2008 @ 10:49 pm
O’Reilly books are your friends - and if you are luck you can usually find them really cheap (used) on either half.com or alibris.com
Pick your poison and get on with it. The “llama” book as I’ve come to call it is a page turner if you want to learn perl.
I learned ksh/csh by doing. I’ll say its the easiest for me, but then again I’ve been trying to teach myself perl for years and haven’t gotten very far (ksh keeps getting in the way along with tcl)
http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ - documentation on Ruby as well as a small sim to wet your appetite and get a feel for the language
http://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide - The Wiki Beginner’s Guide to Python
If you’re familiar with HTML and want to stick in the webdev environment, then learning PHP/MySql might be your cup of tea. Some great resources out there - just google it.
Comment by macfoo — January 17, 2008 @ 10:55 pm
http://w3schools.com is a good place to start for a variety of basic tutorials.
If you’re mainly interested in web programming, you’ll definitely want to expand your knowledge of HTML, and learn some CSS. Then you can work on JavaScript for making things fancy, and PHP for serving up dynamic pages. I personally am better at HTML/PHP than CSS and I don’t have much knowledge of JavaScript at all at the moment.
I’m a relative newbie to scripting as well, so if you need some basic help, feel free to contact me.
As for the desktop coding thing, I’m not that into it, so my knowledge is slim. Although I do have a basic understanding of command line C .
I hope this helps. Good luck.
Comment by David — January 17, 2008 @ 11:00 pm
Congrats! Coding can be a very fun hobby or even better a well-paying career!
If I were you I’d start off by looking for online tutorials for the language you want to learn. Myself I write PHP mostly but I actually didn’t start with PHP, I started with Perl. Through learning Perl I learned many programming basics that would later help me to jump into PHP without much trouble at all.
If I were you I’d start by looking up some PHP tutorials and just start reading (and experimenting) away! Come up with a simple project you’d like to accomplish and then figure out how to solve the problem.
Hope that helps!
Comment by Evan Agee — January 17, 2008 @ 11:01 pm
Sorry, 2 more things.
1. I agree with macfoo, O’Reilly books are completely awesome.
and 2. For the record, it’s Cplusplus that I know. Apparently the plus signs don’t work through the comments. (Random thought, maybe I should have used the entity. Test: [ &43; ])
Comment by David — January 17, 2008 @ 11:05 pm
I’m working through Chris Pine’s great book, appropriately titled “Learn to Program.” It takes you through the fundamentals of programming, and it’s great because it uses Ruby. That way, you’re learning to code on a broader level, but at the same time you’re learning a modern and relevant language. It’s short and will lead you into the Pragmatic Bookshelf series, specifically “Programming Ruby.”
I highly recommend it. Good luck!
Comment by Josh R. Holloway — January 17, 2008 @ 11:13 pm
Easiest way to learn is to pick a single language, i.e. PHP. Php is a great language to start with because it is derived from many other languages, and if you can get PHP then learning the others won’t be hard at all.
Also, don’t just look up pieces of code and slap them together. Create a project or goal. So, for php/MySQL work, create a final project of making a forum or something. But make small projects, so for your first php project you could try a comment system or something — enter text, hit submit, posts text. It takes a little MySQL knowledge, but its not hard to learn at all.
Comment by Michael Yurechko — January 17, 2008 @ 11:14 pm
If you’re going into xhtml and css I highly recommend Head First HTML with xHTML and CSS. Their teaching method is incredible and its entertaining. One of the things I loved in this book was the “Fireside Chats.” One of these “chats” was html and css arguing with each other like if they were real people. By the end the debate you knew what to use css for and what to use html for. http://www.headfirstlabs.com/
For programming, I was told by a programming to stay away from Applescript as a first language because its “english like” syntax was more of a curse than blessing. Right now I’m learning Objective C has my first programming language from Kochan’s book: Programming in Objective C. What’s nice about this book is it doesn’t teach that you have to learn plain C programming before going to Objective C. It assumes that this is your first language. The only reason I reading to book is because Head First hasn’t come up with a Objective C yet.
Comment by Sheridan Haskell — January 17, 2008 @ 11:15 pm
This is exactly how I learned to program:
- I started out by learning HTML with a reference sheet (specifically, one from HowStuffWorks.com), and just experimented with a lot of things.
- I was able to quickly learn CSS because of having to use the link styles, and it just eventually grew from there.
- Javascript came soon after I began understanding the DOM, and I learned it out of a book: http://ineasysteps.com/books/details/?184078315x
- PHP took the longest to somewhat master, but I had the basics down pretty quickly with this book (and I learned SQL, too! .. and a bit of XML :DD): http://ineasysteps.com/books/details/?184078282x
As for desktop programming, I can’t really help you, there. I guess I would recommend Cocoa Dev Central, but once you get into Objective-C programming part of their tutorials, well, their tutorials kind of go downhill in complexity. Who knows, maybe you’ll understand more than I did. http://cocoadevcentral.com/
Comment by Chris Voll — January 18, 2008 @ 6:40 am
I also recommend starting with PHP. It’s very easy to learn and a very powerful tool. Also http://www.php.net is a great reference tool.
If building web applications is your goal I would also recommend learning CSS and JavaScript.
Good luck….!
Comment by Jeremy — January 18, 2008 @ 4:50 pm
Michael, keep us posted on what you do. I really want to get into coding too. I already am rather adept at XHTML and CSS, but I want to get into Javascript/PHP/Ruby on the internet and Cocoa and its components for the Mac. Interestingly enough the first language I got into was AppleScript. I was nine at the time… The knowledge I got from making a few pointless apps hasn’t done me any good. I think I’m going to start with W3 Schools’ Javascript tutorial. Good luck.
Comment by nathan miller — January 18, 2008 @ 5:53 pm
Well I learned XHTML and CSS last year by looking at other people’s work (not stealing, but looking at how things are made). I never had success with tutorials, since most of them are too basic. I’m now experimenting JavaScript with libraries, it’s easier and faster to learn that way. The next step is MySQL as I know basic PHP and I need to be able to use databases efficiently.
Comment by Justin — January 19, 2008 @ 1:14 am
Definitely learn the fundamentals of programming like programming concepts and logic flows. Once you pick up on it, other scripts or languages are quicker to grasp. For beginners, you might want to check out Hackety Hack, a Ruby starter kit.
Comment by Fazimoto — January 19, 2008 @ 11:00 am
I ‘v decided to send you some help that will get you started in the right direction.
Knowing your ability to self-learn. Three great tools have been provided for you, and are now
sitting on your desk.
Anthony Mistretta
Comment by Anthony — January 19, 2008 @ 4:00 pm
I’m in the same boat. I plan to start with CSS, and take it from there. (If you use Coda, it comes with a few very helpful reference books)
Comment by Timothy Andrew — January 31, 2008 @ 9:55 am
Hello Michael,
I am another 15 year old, a freshmen in high school, just like you!
It seems you are more of a photography/journalist sort of web guy. I’m more of a programming/computer science sort of guy. I started with Visual Basic. From a programming veteran I know (pretty well known C programmer) he says Visual Basic seems to be the fastest to learn. Well he wasn’t the one to influence me to doing Visual Basic, but he sort of made me happy I started out with it. (I started programming around 11~12ish. He told me that a few weeks ago =D)
I can find my way around PHP, C , C, Java, Python, (x)HTML, CSS, JS, and a couple more. I recently started attempting to learn Objective-C. Its not going too well, although I understand the ultra-basic concepts of it.
I never bought books for any of this programming-learning-curve.
To choose which language you want to learn first, it all depends. If you think you’ll stay all web guy, then go xhtml, javascript, css. Definitely get around learning PHP (or Ruby). Ruby [on Rails] is really receiving a lot of usage and attention lately.
But if you think you might want to go the computing platform, then definitely start out with PHP. Learn the basics of programming. However, as PHP has not much usage on the desktop platform, with the knowledge you gained from PHP, start learning C and if you want more, C. If you understand PHP, basic C isn’t going to be bad at all.
As linguists can pick up new languages really quickly, real programmers can pick up new programming languages very quickly.
Learn the general syntax, data typing, loops, conditions, variables, etc and just keep trying to make new things.
Like on my first or second week of Objective-C I didn’t care where I was at, I attempted to create a Stopwatch/Timer and I succeeded in doing so, so just keep trying new experiments and think up of creative things to make.
Just practice practice practice whatever language you decide to start with.
If you have a PC, even an old one, I would highly recommend you start with Visual Basic, but learning PHP as beginning would be decent.
Some people have been telling you to start with CSS, and my opinion is, don’t. CSS isn’t really a ‘programming language’ its just styling syntax. Don’t really start with (x)html as a “Programming language” as xhtml is basically just markup. However, javascript, would be somewhat of a “programming language” although I wouldn’t recommend javascript either.
Get MAMP and start learning PHP is what I would say. But Visual Basic, or javascript wouldn’t be too bad. They still will teach you the basics of programming and syntax of programming in general.
Comment by Keehun Nam — April 30, 2008 @ 3:44 pm
One more thing. Never memorize everything in a programming language. As for me, I just memorize what they are called and look it up when I need to use it. It just allows you to learn a lot of a language pretty fast. Utilize snippets. Never delete your code, even broken ones as you can look back at them and learn from them. Of course really commonly used things like for loops or if statements, you should always know how to do once you start learning.
Comment by Keehun Nam — April 30, 2008 @ 3:46 pm