I’ve researched the topic and I understand that the general advice is that it’s best to learn on your own. However, I’d like to see Lemmy’s recommendations regarding websites where you can book programming (Python/R) sessions with a personal tutor online, ideally if you have used the service yourself. I mostly need it to maintain my motivation and learn regularly instead of sporadically.
Sorry I can’t actually answer your question, but in my experience, it’s hard to learn actual programming in a classroom type setting. I got a 4 year degree from a state school in computer science, and I’ve been working as a software engineer since may of 2020 (and a student contractor for 2 years before that), and I think 90% of my experience was obtained on the job.
That being said, I do think finding a tutorial online for the type of project you want to learn is a great starting point, provided you have the basic knowledge of programming concepts. If you don’t, I think w3schools is a great place to grab those. Private tutors or online classrooms are going to be expensive and the quality might not be guaranteed.
What I think you really need / want is guided, hands-on learning. Most languages and frameworks are free to download and use, and there’s lots and lots of tutorials out there. A great basic one for full stack engineering is a making a To-Do List (django python back end, and either react or angular front end is a decently easy framework). It’ll teach you basic front-end, back-end, and database concepts, and then you can play around with it whoever you want. I’d recommend uploading it to your personal github repo eith a README file talking about how to run it locally, so you can send it to possible employers. That’s a big thing that a lot of companies ask for in the interview process.
Thanks a lot, great advice! Anything else you’d recommend apart from W3schools?
Also, if you’re looking for motivation, I totally get that. I normally don’t do personal projects, because it feels like work, and I like to keep that separate from free time. But I found it’s easier to find motivation when it’s something you enjoy. The project I’ve worked most on is a magic item shop generator for the D&D games I run since I always found coming up with prices and random items to be difficult. I haven’t turned it into a full web app yet, it’s just a script to print out a table with the PrettyTables python library, but I worked on that in the airport on my last vacation because I was enjoying it!
Thanks for sharing, but it seems I don’t have an idea of what I’d enjoy programming for yet. I’m looking to get into Data Science as a new career so it’s more complicated to learn it in a fun mode 🙂
I know Python specifically has a lot of good documentation online, but it’s pretty technical language. I would really recommend coding along with a tutorial online