I have taken a programming course 2 years ago but I haven’t worked in programming since then. I recently found a programmer job, but there is no programming team so for me to gain valuable experience from.
I am Programming by myself and making changes on a program already made by my Ex-colleague. I need to know what should I do to be on the right track for becoming a professional programmer without a team to take experience from. What are the good practices to improve and what are the bad ones?
I’m using VB.Net, ASP.Net and SQL.
5
I experienced the exact same thing around 6 or 7 months ago. You will certainly remember the things you learnt 2 years ago very quickly as you do more and more work.
My best advice for you, based on my own experience is to get your hands on a copy of the following books:
- The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master
by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas - Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware
by Andy Hunt
Primarily the first one.
You would learn all that can be learned from those books as time goes by and you make a lot of the mistakes it points out, I just wish in hindsight that I had brushed over each of these books to avoid a lot of unnecessary pain that comes with encountering the issues yourself.
Other than that be active in your learning and ensure you are asking why something works, don’t just accept that it works.
I was a naive programmer 1.5 year ago. TO be able to learn programming (in situations when you are not already a programming background) you first need to build some confidence in programming.
- Concentrate on one programming language initially
-
Try to grasp the generic concepts form it like (not in order)
- Compilation process
- runtime
- Memory management
- Message passing
- methods invocations
- nature of variables, etc
that are applicable almost all programming language
-
Then focus the building of your
logicin context of the programming language. - Its not always that what you plan you can (or should) program.
- go for the best approach no matter what (no compromise while learning)
- Read some good code.
- listen to music
I am posting some URLs that you can use to get an idea
- Udacity
- http://codeacademy.com/
- Khan Academy
- projecteuler
- Learn Street(Specially for Python, Ruby and JS)
You need to first do code, and then code on different logic with different application, like web application and windows application.
You have to be clear with your logic. Alternatively, you can get sample code from the internet or other Stack Exchange sites, for example Stack Overflow.
Just practice your coding. Experience can make you perfect.