As the former President of the NU Entrepreneurs Club, I would receive an email almost daily from someone in the community looking for a developer to join their team. Now as COO of influencers@, I recently had to send those emails myself to recruit a new technical lead for our product and saw how challenging it is if you don’t have technical skills in house. That is what pushed me over the edge to learn back-end coding. I’m now finishing my first web application built in PHP. It was hard, it was scary, but I taught myself to code, and you can too. Here’s some advice to get started:
1. You need a real project
In order to teach yourself to code, you need some sort of tangible problem to focus on. You can’t just go into the project saying, “I want to learn PHP.” That won’t work. What works is, “I’m going to create a web-based grocery list that reminds me when to pick up milk, using PHP”.
2. Write out what you want to do
Coding is all about logic and process. You are essentially writing instructions, explaining to a computer how to do something. So before you try to code it, write it down in plain english. For example:
- Have a form that asks the user what their favorite color is.
- Take whatever text the user enters into the form and display it on the page.
- Make that text blue.
3. Start with the basics: HTML
HTML is the fundamental language of the web. It is what your web browser (ie Google Chrome) uses to display websites. You will use HTML to figure out how your website will look. Focus on that for now before you think about functionality. Make text display on the page. Make the text blue. Put it in the center of the page. That stuff is easier… get it down first.
5. The Internet is your best friend
The Internet has absolutely every piece of information you need to learn how to code, and it’s all free. When you want to know how to code something, just type it into google. If you’re like me and don’t have Internet at home, practice coding at a local cafe with Wi-Fi. Once you learn enough, you won’t need an internet connection to code.
6. Take it one step at a time
The thought of coding a big web application can be really daunting. Don’t think like that – take your project in small chunks. Your only objective is to put blue text on the page. Once that is done, then you can think about centering it.
What you need to get started:
- Computer with an Internet connection
- Notepad/Textedit or a basic code editor like Sublime Text 2 (also free)
What you should learn (in this order):
- HTML
- CSS
- jQuery
- PHP / MySQL (or another back-end language like Python or Ruby)
- Frameworks like Codeigniter
What you should do right now:
To start, Google HTML and start going through a tutorial. Open Notepad or Textedit and follow along. Save your file as a .HTML file and open it in your web browser. While tutorials are good to read and simulation sites are handy to practice syntax, they alone will not teach you how to code. The best way is to get your hands dirty and try building something yourself from scratch.
Good luck and feel free to shoot me an email if you get stuck.