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Discussion on: [Hello,Please what tools do i need to start learning coding from its basics?"#discuss".How can i learn coding by myself?

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djuber profile image
Daniel Uber

The laptop you already have will work just fine (you don't need to find or buy any new equipment to get started).

You will need a program that can edit files (in plain text, not a word processor), and you probably already have one, and there are plenty of choices available. If you can open "notepad" on your computer you have this part already, but almost every other choice will give you more "support" like helping you spot typos, or knowing which words can be used in your code language, but you don't have to make that the first thing you worry about.

You'll probably want a book, or a help/tutorial site, that speaks to you at your level of experience, both with computers (what they do and how they do it), and any prior exposure to programming you might have had.

If you're not learning to code in a language that's already installed on your computer, you'll probably need to find a way to run that code. If you're learning web programming, you will only really need a web-browser for a long time, and when you need more tools installed, you'll know how to do that. If you're learning another language like Python, Ruby, or Go, or running javascript outside of a browser, you probably will need to download some software to run those programs. The guidebook you follow will definitely include a section on "getting set up" that should end with a tiny program that barely does anything but print "hello" on your computer. That's just enough code to show you that all the parts the computer needs to have available to get a program to run are in place and working, before you worry about writing the programs you want. If you are interested in website programming as a starting point, your browser, and any text editor, will be everything you need right away.

If you don't have any special task in mind and just want to explore what "code" looks like, I would recommend looking at the resources on the python site designed for non-programmers (people who want to learn python, but don't already feel comfortable writing programs in another language) wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuid...
This might involve downloading and installing python on your computer as a required first step but other than that is just a text editor, a guide book/website, and time to follow along with it.

If you're interested in web programming specifically, I think the w3schools.com/ site has a lot of short lessons in a tutorial sequence and is completely free. You'll probably get some feedback from other people that the style of html used, or the choice of javascript libraries it describes is "old", which is fair, the site has been around a long time and has some older information still available, but it's also self-contained and unlikely to depend on programs you don't have or that will change in the near future. Web programming tends to change very quickly, and figuring out what's the trendy framework right now for large industries is something to worry about later, not when you're getting started. There are also a lot of other available guides for this.

You definitely don't need a super powered computer or a lot of memory or a lot of space to get started. Just time, effort, and curiosity.

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mccurcio profile image
Matt C

All very sound advice. ;)

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victorjoseph profile image
victor-joseph

Oh! Thank you

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anitabe404 profile image
Anita Beauchamp

Adding to what Daniel said (all of which is great advice): if you're trying to learn web development there are two really great, free resources designed for beginners:

  • freeCodeCamp has multiple certifications that you can do that cover both front-end and back-end web development. You can learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Python among other things.
  • The Odin Project has a web development course with two tracks: Ruby on Rails or Fullstack JavaScript (the site goes into more details about what each of those means).

Both are really great resources for beginners. freeCodeCamp is the easiest because they start you off using the browser. The Odin Project requires more set up (you install the languages onto your computer and run them using the Command Line Interface), but they go into greater technical detail about each language and how the internet and the world wide web work in general.

Please let me know if you have any other questions or need more assistance. I will be happy to help you get started off in the right direction.

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Juraj Maťaše

Thank you for sharing this. I started The Odin Project, and it's awesome :-)

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victorjoseph profile image
victor-joseph

Oh thank you, I'm really grateful to hearing from you.