today I’m going to talk about the three mistakes coders make when they first started are three mistakes beginners make and I made myself when I first started to learn how to code.
Why Beginners Struggle :
just a quick background on me if you’ve New here, I did not know anything about coding I searched everywhere I tried you I tried many online resources, I tried everything I tried books I’m a slow reader so I didn’t like that um to learn how to code cuz I had an idea I was passionate about and I wanted to make um. So eventually I found a program called team treehouses are an online code school they teach a wide range of courses they have thousands of videos um I learned Java in a month Android 2 months after that so 3 months um in total to make my first Android app the app I really wanted to make um it was a really enriching experience I learned a lot and I continue to study Java to this day that’s why I started this website to help beginners who want to learn how to code but but are unsure of whether they should do it.
Ignoring Libraries :
so today I’m going to talk about three mistakes I made as a beginner starting out coding of course this is a extremely um narrow um three mistakes I’m about to give there’s thou there there’s hundreds of not thousands there’s hundreds of mistakes beginners probably make and hundreds of mistakes I made first learning how to code because it was very difficult um there’s so much to learn in coding you can’t learn it all in the beginning and you will make mistakes inevitably but anyway my first mistake or first mistake you might make learning to code is ignoring libraries.
Why Libraries Make You a Better Programmer :
basically libraries and coding is it’s basically like a collection of code that solves a problem in a concise way and it’s it’s ready to use just like you pick up a book and has a solution to your problem a library is a collection of code collection of programs to allow you to solve a problem. so when you’re coding and you need to solve a problem.
maybe parsing an image maybe formatting an image and there’s already a library for that there’s no reason to solve a problem that’s already been solved and tested by thousands of people uh the thing about most libraries. that is that they’re open source people can openly manipulate them and redistribute the software for the benefit of International coding community so you really want to take advantage of libraries learn what they are Team Treehouse talks about libraries.
they gave a great in-depth tutorial in the Java Basics course about libraries at the time when I learned they didn’t have it but they do have it now but anyway libraries very important you need to use them to make your programs more efficient and it makes you an overall better coder because you learn how to use other people’s code and it allows you it actually augment your code in a sense because you learn how to cooperate with other people’s programs and stuff like that.
Not Using Free and Cheap Learning Resources :
so for my second point is a mistake you I made was I didn’t use cheap and free resources in the beginning when I could have I don’t recommend going only free sources but I do recommend research on online tutorials, because not every online course that you pay for is going to cover everything about coding team Tre house is amazing but it’s not going to cover everything okay they’ll cover like 95% of the stuff but like the minor topics you go on forums go on stack Overflow learn about the smaller details the minutia of the language you’re learning which is really beneficial but I still recommend treeh house excellent for beginners excellent for intermediate coders experts at the point you’re an intermediate coder you’ll be able to direct your learning you won’t even need a place to learn you’ll just learn yourself but beginners and intermediates team Treehouse is awesome but still take advantage of free resources take advantage of library books whatever you can find to learn to augment your overall understanding of the coding language you’re learning.
Not Understanding Memory :
and number three this is kind of like esoteric this is not exactly something you think of off the top of your head as a mistake coders commonly make but memory leaks basically when you have a program when you have an application that needs to run on Hardware the software or program has to say hey I need this amount of memory give it to me this is mine now and I’m going to use it so basically you’re allocating memory to the program and the program says hey this memories mine and if your program doesn’t handle the me when your program stops running if it doesn’t say okay.
I’m done with it then that’s a memory leak because it’s going to hold on to that memory that’s and it’s not using it it’s going to keep holding on to it and that’s a waste of memory it can cause your application to lag it can cause your phone to crash many of my first Android apps I didn’t handle memory correctly I create extra resources you’ll see what I mean when you start learning to code I created extra resources that my my program didn’t need I didn’t release the resources and they continued to run in the background and I eventually crashed my phone and I couldn’t even get it to turn on and it was crazy that probably won’t happen to you because I made a really intensive application like intensive.
on the operating system but you want to really understand the lower level processes that happen you need to understand threads this is covered very well in treehouse when I screwed up my my phone with that application I skipped the lesson on threading uh you need to understand threads you need to understand how memory is allocated Java is actually Java actually does memory handling very well it does it automatically for you but there’s still a chance the occasional memory leak can happen and in Android it did happen to me with an application that I made that was really intensive on the phone but uh memory leaks are very important to understand this is something that it’s not critical in the beginning later on these smaller details are critical to the overall user experience of the app.
but anyway those are the top three things I had for you about the biggest mistakes beginners make when they first learn to program I really wanted to make this list detailed and really minute not like those very broad posts that don’t really help you I want to make make it very like experiential like these like memory leaks that’s something you wouldn’t think of normally but that’s only something you can learn from actually doing coding and messing up and these things happening to you and that’s really what I want to do with this website Java programming for beginners.