Cunning linguistics

Sticking to it
One other resource worth considering is the short course. Some TAFE institutes will run courses a few weeks in length that, when combined with a fair amount of self-study and experimentation on your part, should help you immensely.

Being marked on your progress or simply having another person there, watching over you, willing to review your work, can prove a great source of motivation. Remember that by choosing to teach yourself programming – in the true sense, not just the by-rote-in-21-days sense – you’ve set yourself up for a good many hours of hard work and dull reading. For the first week you might be excited by the idea of learning something new and will happily spend hours with your head hidden behind a guidebook or computer screen, but as time goes by you’ll really have to motivate yourself to stick with it when you have infinitely more entertaining books to read and a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV to complete. Someone who can kick you up the arse or tell you that you need to work on your understanding of a certain topic would help a lot. So too would tried and true methods of motivation, like setting some realistic goals and developing some ‘standards’ to adhere to. For instance, you could decide to spend a minimum of a hour a day – as you might when learning a spoken language in a non-immersion environment – either reading guidebooks, chatting on relevant forums to programmers or simply mucking about with the language.

And again, the point of all this isn’t to become fluent in a given language. If you happen to become so, that’s swell, but what’s really important – what will actually help you both in your studies and in the future, when you’re in a workplace environment – is knowing the concepts behind the syntax, as these are common between all languages. That’s not to say the concepts are exactly the same between different languages, but once you understand the mechanics of programming, picking up specific languages shouldn’t be too difficult.

Know your tools
Programming languages are but sets of tools useful for solving problems. That, after all, is what you’re aiming to do, no? Problem solving – and how it’s achieved in a digital environment – is the skill you need to develop most of all. The syntax itself is, at your stage, useful in that it gives you something you can look at and play with – a practical demonstration of the theory, if you will – but it’s not the be all and end all, even though the presentation of your Learn XYZ book might suggest otherwise. To be a programmer – a real one, as opposed to a bloody parrot with a keyboard – is to understand, rather than just copy, what’s really being expressed in the sample code at a deeper level than just “oh, this instruction will let me greet the world because SAMS told me it will let me greet the world.” Don’t use the guidebooks in this way. Use them to improve your understanding of exactly what the problem is that you’re trying to solve in each example – even the obligatory ‘hello world’ one – so you can, when you feel up to putting down the book and getting your hands dirty, break the problem into bite-sized pieces, just as a real programmer would, considering them both as individuals and as a whole, before translating it into syntax, rather than the other way round.

Teaching yourself your first programming language probably won’t be all that easy – at least not when you’re aiming to understand the concepts rather than just the syntax – but it should prove rewarding. Furthermore, it will give you the edge when you’re faced with programming units at a TAFE or university level. Lecturers may tell you that they won’t assume you have any prior knowledge of the material, but remember they’re speaking from an expert’s perspective and, too, are limited by the nature of the thirteen week semester in how long they can spend guiding you through the basics.