Ironically, I am a self taught programmer despite having a Computer Science Under-graduation under my belt. The reason is I never learnt Programming while I was college, not because I didn’t want but the curriculum was extremely boring and useless. Because I wasn’t taught programming, I was just taught Syntaxes. I was made learn how to initialize a variable, how to sum two variables, how to create an array. I was primarily taught ‘How To’ rather than when to use an array, when to handle an exception.
Later I realised, They were actually training me to be a ‘Compiler’ but not a ‘Programmer’. Because that’s what you’d become when you just learn ‘How To’ in programming instead of learning the scenarios ‘When To’ use those Syntaxes or basic elements.
And this is why it’s very important for a newbie who wants to learn to code to be on a curriculum/platform that encourages ‘Case-based learning’ (like Freecodecamp, Code Academy) than ‘Syntax-based Learning’ (Tutorialspoint). We live in an age where Google and Stackoverflow are at our finger tips which makes me wonder what’s the point of memorising (How To) syntaxes when those can be found in a jiff.
Consider this case where a beginner would like to do a Web Scraping Project:
Things to know:
- What is Web Scraping?
- What Language to Choose?
- What Module/Package in that Particular Language would help solve this problem?
And after a small exercise, the newbie can come up with two keywords like ‘python’ and ‘beautifulsoup’ and then all it takes is a simple Google search:
This works very well when someone sits on top of the newbie’s head and orders him/her to create a web scraping project but that’s not what one would want to do in a professional environment. Learning this way, the newbie can learn ‘When To’ use webscraping to solve a problem (while also learning how to do webscraping).
This learning also helps the newbie weed out the boring part and do exciting stuff that sends positive feedback to the brain, which in turn increases determination and motivates further deep learning.