6 ways to improve your programming skills

To improve your knowledge, you need not only to study but also to practice. You can study the subject area yourself, read books, and review someone else’s code, but it is even more important to try, practice, make mistakes and learn from them.

To learn how to program, you need to program.

What are the study options?

1. Write code

Start every new program from scratch. Design the entire architecture yourself and implement it. Repeat. You will learn from your mistakes, and at the end of the project, you will have much more fun than reading a book. In addition, you will “fill your hand” and will quickly navigate those issues that you have figured out yourself.

2. Read a difficult book on programming

Much knowledge can be gleaned from books. Undoubtedly, practice is very important, but by reading at least one good, complex book on programming, you will not only test your thinking but, most likely, pump your skill in this matter.

Here is an example of such literature:

• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, Hal Abelson

• A Discipline of Programming, Edsger W. Dijkstra

• Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, Seif Haridi.

3. Learn more about resources to practice programming

Various problem-solving websites will help develop logic and understanding of algorithms in different languages. Here are some useful resources for you to consider:

Codewars

Earn points, increase your rating, and create clans. The platform offers a huge selection of tasks in more than 20 programming languages. At Codewars, you can discuss problems with other players, as well as see alternative solutions.

Project Euler

The interface is perhaps not the most sophisticated, but there are a lot of puzzles in different languages. Much attention is paid to mathematical problems. A simple site to get started quickly.

HackerRank

The level of difficulty of tasks on HackerRank is slightly higher, there are tasks that go beyond basic programming. You can develop in several areas, including algorithms, mathematics, SQL, functional programming, AI and more. The platform also provides functionality for corporate programming.

4. Join an open-source project

What are the benefits of participating in an open-source project? Teamwork (a wonderful thing, especially if you previously worked only on your own), the opportunity to learn to dig into someone else’s code, understanding it (quite a difficult task). Well-known communities of open source developers:

GitHub

Sourceforge.

5. Read and study code

Explore interesting code. A good operating system for educational purposes is MINIX3. You will be able to learn many new language idioms, as well as something else about software architecture. Reading unfamiliar source code is hard, but very rewarding work.

6. Join programming courses 

Try to approach the problem in a complex way. Choose the right and reliable course to study. And they won’t always paid. A good recommendation is the Mage Mastery courses.

Choose some of them on Mage Mastery for FREE:

Magento 2 Command Line Interface (CLI) for Beginners

Manual QA in Magento 2 for Beginners

User Registration with PHP and MySQL

Was it helpful? Please share this piece of content with friends and colleagues.