How to know if one is "suitable" to study Programming and work professionally?

[Bruno Valdeolmillos]

Hello, good day, I am in the forum guide, exercise 1 and I could NOT do the cycle if the person enters a 0 WITHOUT seeing the solution that the professor  on YT. I am already old and I do not have much time or resources and I NEED to know THE TRUTH. Thank you

[Carey Brown]

It depends on what your goals are, if you are trying to get a job professionally, perhaps not. I would think it would depend on if you are normally a logical thinker and break down your tasks into subtasks that can be solved then you'd have a good chance. It would also depend on whether of not you enjoy the learning process and find you get satisfaction when you can successfully solve a programming problem.

Every body learns differently. My goto in the beginning was to read lots of code written by others and try to understand what they do, pretty much with a good reference at my elbow to look things up. If I couldn't get it I type it in and get it to run then sprinkle it with print statements to see how it behaves. Practicing on snippets of code is a good thing to do through out your programing days. When I come across something new I'll still write a tiny program to make sure  I really understand it.

Personally I'm not a big fan of learning from YT. I find I have to pause or rewind often to catch the half-second of critical knowledge.

In the end, if you don't enjoy it you won't put in the many hours learning this stuff takes.

[Bruno Valdeolmillos]

Carey Brown wrote:It depends on what your goals are, if you are trying to get a job professionally, perhaps not. I would think it would depend on if you are normally a logical thinker and break down your tasks into subtasks that can be solved then you'd have a good chance. It would also depend on whether of not you enjoy the learning process and find you get satisfaction when you can successfully solve a programming problem.

Every body learns differently. My goto in the beginning was to read lots of code written by others and try to understand what they do, pretty much with a good reference at my elbow to look things up. If I couldn't get it I type it in and get it to run then sprinkle it with print statements to see how it behaves. Practicing on snippets of code is a good thing to do through out your programing days. When I come across something new I'll still write a tiny program to make sure  I really understand it.

Personally I'm not a big fan of learning from YT. I find I have to pause or rewind often to catch the half-second of critical knowledge.

In the end, if you don't enjoy it you won't put in the many hours learning this stuff takes.

Hello good day, I mean intellectual capacity, not whether you like it or not.
For example, if you want to be a professional tennis player, then at 15 you should play in the first division and at 18 you should already be in a qualifier at a MINIMUM. That's the test for example, of course, unless you've had injuries or things like that.
what do you mean with goto? thanks

[Carey Brown]

"My goto" ==> "What I did..."

[Carey Brown]

Unfortunately intellectual capacity does decrease with age but only you can answer that for you. I feel I took longer than most to understand streams and lambdas and even then not to the depth I'd like. But perhaps that's my own expectations. Sometimes the enjoyment (if you get any) can help you drive past that, sometimes not. If you are questioning this and your goal is a career change  that doesn't bode well.

[Vineeth Menon]

Hi Bruno,

Not sure if this is relevant here, but here is my two cents. Studying how to crack interviews (for different companies) is quite different from learning how to code. The reason why I am mentioning this is because usually these days most of the companies ask a lot of Data structures and algorithm questions combined with System design questions (E.G. Design a video sharing webite which can handle more than 5 million requests per second). I personally find that the former involves less logic and more "getting used to interview questions" involved. As a programmer I have never inverted a Binary tree or never had to find the starting point of a cyclic Linked List. If you are preparing for interviews, practicing such questions and understanding the core-concepts of interview related questions is the only factor. If you have to look at YouTube and understand it by no means is a reflection of your intellect. I am mentioning this since for the longest time (almost 7 years) I though I was dumb as a bag of hammers until I cracked an Amazon SDE III and after 2 months only to forget everything!!! And by forget everything does not mean a complete hard disk wipe, but more like; what used to take me 10 - 15 minutes, now would probably take 45 minutes - 1 hour. There are some stuff like time and space complexity which are quite useful for everyday programming. I am yet to come across a person solve something like this in less than 30 minutes if they are seeing this question for the first time. I personally never look at interview questions unless I have to attend an interview.

Learning how to code, is a bit different. It involves understanding the language/framework, spending time exploring and obviously doing some real world examples. I personally prefer a video tutorial where I can view a chapter and then play around that understand what it does and then move forward. E.G. I learned Spring Boot from Udemy. I watch each section, explore it by myself, poke around stuff until I'm satisfied and then move ahead with the next section.

Hope this helps...

[Paul Clapham]

Carey Brown wrote:Personally I'm not a big fan of learning from YT. I find I have to pause or rewind often to catch the half-second of critical knowledge.

When I learn from tutorials, my process is to download sample source code from the tutorial and modify it until it does something that I want. So here I don't just have the goal of, say, learning about streams. I have the goal of implementing some useful stream code. I feel that if you just learn, say, streams so that you can say you know how to use streams, that isn't as practical.

Anyway, note the "download" part there. You won't be able to download from a YouTube video, but if they provide an online link where you can download their source code then it might be a bit less annoying to watch. There are plenty of text-based tutorials around, though, and since Java programming is a text-based process it would be better to use them.

[Tim Holloway]

I'm already well-recorded for my disdain for YouTube tutorials. Not that they're totally useless, but too often used as a lazy substitute for writing things down properly. And I prefer the "random access" abilities you get from hard-copy over having to search back and forth in a video.

I don't care HOW many books get printed titled "Become a Master Programmer in 24 Hours". If you have no patience, you will not make it in software design and development. It's akin to sculpture, where you have to carve out many fine points one at a time to create a whole. Although at least you can correct your mistakes more easily. It's not going to take 24 hours. To become truly competent, you'll need more than 24 weeks.

Learning a programming language is very much like learning any foreign language, Each language has a particular mind-set that must be mastered in addition to the basic language syntax - as well as its support library resources. Witness Carey's confusion. Lambdas were a late addition to Java, but in the LISP language, they are one of the first and most important things you need to learn.

Don't look to software developlement as a path to riches. If you're not a "puzzle solver", you'll probably hate it too much to do well. Although if you are, you'll likely end up experimenting with things on your own time. Oh, and Human Resources people are utterly clueless about what the job requires. All they care about is being told the things in their checklists, even if they are lies.

Don't buy into the idea that age means lack of mental ability. Recent studies indicate that unless you descend into dementia, it's less a matter of abilities dying off as it is a shifting in abilities.

[Liutauras Vilda]

A perspective from slightly different angle.

To pickup book, tutorial, video might be more challenging than you think, simply because you don't know where to start. Everything looks confusing and nothing makes sense - and I wouldn't expect it to be very much different from that.

Consider a short course, which could provide you a more disciplined intro to a field, and material provided in a logical sequence.

Don't rule out a higher education degree in computer science. That would take more time and would require more dedication, but this is where you could start really liking computer science as a discipline. Then naturally you may grow into problem solver and would boost your confidence about what you can and what you can't.

I personally found coderanch to be a very big contributor to my journey where I am at now, by reading through the topics here at ranch and in small baby steps trying to help others researching things myself and learning at the same time. But at the end it was a combination of a degree + coderanch. Also at some point I decided to take a Java certificate, which I believe helped me to bypass some interview stages, well, it depends a lot on a field company operate at and the interviewer of course.

Financial institutions, well, at least in my experience, heavily rely their interview processes based on computer science topics, where some other companies on more practical exercises, which you can practice these days a lot on Internet by trying to solve various prepared habitual problems.

[kevin Abel]

I found a great Java tutor on a site called preply.com  

I am learning both Mandarin Chinese and Java.   My tutor assists me with both.

I learn them both for fun and not work.   I get surprised how knowing something about each has helped me.  

I was walking past a Chinese Restaurant and saw and elderly man fall.  I helped him get up.  A waitress went to call an ambulance.  I quickly spoke in Mandarin that the guy was now OK.  I felt like a Super hero with the power to pick up a person from the ground and speak in Chinese.

I designed an application but could not code rapidly enough.  I was paired with a Chinese / English speaking programmer.  It was fun when I could answer a question in either language.

It's interesting how I have learned parts of skills that seem useless on their own and then years later I use what I learned.

I took dancing and trumpet lessons in the past.  I'll be at an open mic and get to play with a band.  My friends were amazed.  I've been to social dances and my old Arthur Murray dance lessons got me through a social situation.

If I  had to decide a career path, I'd have to caluculate if it's worth learning Java versus something else where there is more opportunity, but Java seems useful even if to get new concepts in my mind.

I'm not an expert in most of my interests.  Somehow what I learn usually benefits me when I don't expect it.

Thanks for reading this.  I hope the Soft Skills Forum is the correct place for this post.  If not,   I hope a moderator moves it.

Thanks,

Kevin