Best ways to learn how to program?

[nicoti]

I think u need to learn by heard all codes, and it will be your experience. Day for day, night for night

[Hector]

TRIAL and error method is the best start doing projects
learn the basic before that

[Howl]

Just don't limit yourself to any specific platform in terms of learning to code. Go through different tutorials on youtube, research yourself a bit and go where YOU feel comfortable to learn from.

[realEreus]

I would say that to watch YouTube is by far the worse thing you could do. As a CS student, the only thing that helps most students, is to actually make things. Reading books, meh, watching videos, even more meh, just read that official documentation and dive in making your own projects, in no time you'll become skillful enough.

[LOLNICETRYKID1]

I learned from tut on youtube

[CrazyChickenNeverDie]

you just have to practice and practice, dont say no, just learn things, and implement them.
people will tell you its easy and fun. most of the time 90% you will encounter errors and bug fixes,
BUT once you managed to figure it out or something, you will be proud of yourself.

[minakshisondule]

Top 10 Ways to Teach Yourself to Code

Programming is one of the most valuable skills you can pick up in these modern times, whether for career prospects or to stretch your brain and create something awesome. If you're just getting started on your coding journey, here are ten tips and resources to set you off on the right foot.

1. Figure Out Why You Want to Learn to Code
The direction you go in will depend in large part on why you want to learn to code in the first place and how much time you have to devote to learning.

2. Choose the Right Language
There's no one "best" programming language, and once you've learned one, it's fairly easy to pick up another, so don't get hung too up on choosing your first language.

3. Start Small (and Be Patient)
No matter which language or learning method you choose, you should start at the very beginning (a very good place to start).

4. Try a Kids App

Even toddlers are learning to code these days. That's actually a great thing for all of us. Although many of the programs designed to teach kids to code are very simplistic, many of them, like Scratch, are suitable for all ages.

5. Use Free Online Training Sites

Free online training sites like Codecademy and other Hour of Code participants can help you write your first computer program.

6. Take a Coding Course

Online computer science courses offer a bit more of rounded educational experience compared to online training sites focusing on one language. These courses are designed to teach you fundamental skills over several months in college-level classes.


7. Grab Some Free Programming Books

When you get stuck on a problem or just need to look something up, reference books come in very handy.

8. Play Coding Games

Often the best way to learn is through games. While plenty of coding tutorials have you building simple or complex games yourself, a couple of teaching sites are literally games: Code Combat and CodinGame are two you might have fun with.

9. Get a Mentor

The programming community is full of people who are willing to help the next generation of programmers. Hack.pledge() is one site that will connect you to a mentor, or you can sign up to mentor someone else. Even just planning to teach what you've learned can help you retain the information better.

10. Hack Someone Else's Code

When you reverse engineer someone else's code, testing each line to see how it works, you get a better understanding of the big picture. Thanks to tons of open source code, you can learn just about anything�and keep learning through the incremental-hacking cycle. Just remember to share your code back with the community if you improve on a program.

[chief33]

what's snips?

[clonehassoul]

to me to say it depends on what you wanna do - like which tool you wanna create, which website you wanna build (in general its about ideas that appear in your thought to make money), from that you can search and learn specific language and follow guides.

[lemdpcfa]

IMHO the best way to start coding c sharp is to lean some videos, open your ide and start making simples scripts.
dot net is actually not that difficult.

[Manasijoshi]

There is nothing magical about learning to code but I would suggest a few guidelines:

1) Less is more
2) Practice
3) Keep learning

Less is More
Start small. Ruby, Python, C, Javascript are all great. Skip the frameworks (Rails, Django etc.) for now. Skip HTML, CSS, Apache, IIS, AWS etc. You want to learn how to program so learn how to write a program. There are lots of intro books and websites for those languages, start there. If you add in frameworks, databases, markup languages and virtual environments, your head is going to explode. You don't learn by drinking from a firehose, you just get soaked (but you might not be thirsty anymore).

Practice
Since you are learning a programming language like Ruby, write lots of small programs. Seriously, write 10-15 programs with 10 or more lines of code. Each one should do something very straightforward, ideally a single sentence should describe what it does: reverse the output of any input, add up a series of numbers, print out the lines of a file etc. Work up to something like a command line calculator or search a web site for keyboards etc. The typical getting started books have lots of these types of programs for you to work on.
The most important part is you HAVE to write these programs. You cannot learn to program by only reading about it.
The goal is to be able to start with a blank editor screen and write a program that does something meaningful (think a subset of "cat", "grep", "curl" or whatever) without having to use the browser to copy and paste an answer from someone else. Checking the syntax on a command is okay (does the file go in the second or third parameter) but not how to write a loop or check a condition.

Keep Learning
So you can create your subset of a tool like "grep," now what? Well guess what? You have learned how to program. You were successful because you focused on learning one thing.
Now is a time to add in something else. Let's go with learn HTML (skip Javascript, CSS and the various frameworks). Learn the HTML tags, build a few static pages and look at them in the browser. Nothing fancy but it is HTML. Now modify your grep tool to output HTML instead of of text. Get comfortable with this by building a couple of programs to output HTML, again, nothing fancy, the value is doing it repeatedly and being successful rather than inventing the next Facebook.
So you are "comfortable" with a programming language, HTML and generating HTML output? Well, if you are comfortable with structured data from spreadsheets or a tool like Access, you can start with a framework like Rails, otherwise, you need an introduction to structure data and databases. A getting started guide to MySQL, Postgres or Redis (maybe) would be a good place to go).
Once you are at the framework level, you can start to focus on "real" problems. This approach works regardless of web, app or desktop development, the only difference is the tools and frameworks. Break it down and learn the basics before trying to go to the next level. It is really hard to do bike stunts if you can't even ride a bike.

[gawsgawrshgrhrh]

You can start learning by making games.

For example, you can learn C# by programming in Unity or C++ with Unreal.