Modern technology is something that people use in their daily life whether they realize it or not. From electronic items to smartphone and the internet. This has encouraged many people to learn how to code. Students and adults are already in the workforce are increasingly encouraged to learn programming. Even U.S. President Obama said that everyone should learn to code.
There are countless resources that offer the opportunity to learn different skills. From free online classes to courses that are widely available. However, there is one question remains: Does everyone really need to learn to code?
The answer is no, at least if you're not in an industry that relies on technology. But those industries are adopting technology faster than most people think. And the fastest adopted technology in the modern days is the internet and mobile devices.
Understanding the Concept
If your goal is to just understand programming concepts, you can start playing around with a few coding languages and see which one you prefer to learn. However, if you have a goal in mind, such as building an mobile application or a responsive website, you will need the right tool for the job. Although popular web programming languages are popular because its supported community and has many resources to learn from, it doesn't mean that they are 'perfect' for you.
Starting with Web Development
To start learning about web development from the start, you can begin with learning the basic of HTML and CSS.
HTML isn't a programming language; it’s a mark-up language (HyperText Markup Language) used for formatting documents. With HTML, you’re able display things you like (words, pictures, links, etc.) in a format that web browsers understand. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, help you can design the web page you're creating (font, size, columns, etc.).
Even minimal knowledge of HTML and CSS is helpful for people, whether they want to pursue programming or not. Having a blog is becoming something common nowadays. Having a mild understanding of how websites operate, you can learn how to fix some 'glitches' you have on your web page on your own.
Creating a Web Application
When you want to go deeper in understanding how the web works, you can learn how to create good looking website and web application.
Beside styling your web page with CSS, using JavaScript to make a website look great is common. There are a variety of compatible JavaScript frameworks like Ember, Angular and Backbone to help you organize and structure your web applications for multiple browsers.
JavaScript has been around for decades, and it isn’t getting any less relevant. In fact, it’s on track to become the dominant enterprise language. Web applications, sophisticated and interactive websites and social media sites use JavaScript to enhance their appearance.
You can run JavaScript on just about any browser, and it is used to program both frontend and backend services.
To add features for your web application and take your website further into web development, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is one of the most widely used language. Running on the server side, PHP code generates the resulting web page: The commands can also be embedded directly into an HTML.
Learning Fast Prototyping
If you're a designer and want to learn backend programming to test applications, Ruby or Python are good options. Both are object-oriented programming languages
Ruby has a large ecosystem and an active, supportive community. Ruby was created in 1995, but rose to popularity after the Rails software framework launched in 2003 and made building websites and web applications simpler with its collections of pre-written code.
Python, while similar to Ruby, has a somewhat larger scientific community, so if you want to progress into machine learning and artificial intelligence, Python is the language you should learn.
C and C++ are general purpose languages. But ASP (Active Server Pages) Classic, ASP.NET, JSP (JavaServer Pages), PHP, etc. were purposefully designed to create websites, so they grew to be the more popular languages for the web. The same thing happens with Perl. In the early days of the web, Perl used to be the dominant scripting language because at that time, website programming was often done via the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) of web servers. However, that we don't see them too often nowadays. The usage of Perl on web servers fell below 1 percent.
ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) on the other hand, is strange by comparison. Although it's an incredible productive framework for building web applications, it lacks in a lot of technically specific ways. But of you can use it correctly, ColdFusion can be one of the quickest overall experience to get a desirable outcome.
Learning to Create Android and iOS App
On Android, the open-source operating system, app development is mostly done in Java. Java that started life as an alternative to C++ is everywhere - from mobile devices, game consoles to supercomputers. This has made Java a popular language among programmers.
You can build Android applications on Windows or Mac, and purchase relatively cheap devices to test your apps on.
To create app for iOS, you use Objective-C. Objective-C is Apple’s abstraction of C with influences of Smalltalk used primarily for building iOS and Mac applications.
Beyond knowledge of Objective-C there are a few other requirements for creating an iOS app - a Mac running OS X 10.7 or later; Xcode, the free tool needed to build an app; and the iOS software development kit.
Because there is less fragmentation on iOS compared to Android, it's easier to create a one-size-fits-all application for the App Store than Google Play.
Finding the Best for You
Each programming language excels in specific things while others excels in others. There is no language that is best for everything. You don't need to have a particular project in mind to start learning the concepts of programming, but it definitely makes it more enjoyable if you have an idea that you can turn into reality.
To first learn how to code, you can begin by entering classes that doesn’t require programming experience. Once you find a class you’re comfortable with, an idea for a project will materialize, and from there, you can learn as little or as much as you want.
As an alternative, the internet itself is full of information. You can browse for courses and tutorials and start learning right away.