Choosing your first programming language ( Mistakes beginners make)

Career Advice
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Choosing your first language often can be confusing a direct answer to this is to choose one and go in-depth.

Still Confused

You can learn any language that interests you, every language has its own pros and cons. Before learning a language keep a few things in mind:

  1. Ask yourself what’s the purpose of learning the language?
    my reason → I am learning JS because it has many use cases and in my area, I can easily get employed.

  2. How much time will you need to learn the language?
    my reason - I have a lot of time so I am enjoying the learning and very slowly moving forward and I am good with going slow while learning ( you may have very little time).

  3. Check community support for the language.
    my reason- I found JS has great community support so in case of any errors I can ask for help.

  4. Know the use cases of the language, the domain that is used in etc.

Mistakes beginners commit:

Often beginners choose the popular language, there is a difference between a popular language and a language that is actually used in the industry.

Popular language has more people competing for the job here the demand is less and supply will be more resulting in fewer chances of selection and tough interview process.

On the other hand, less popular language has demand but due to lack of supply developers get paid more.

Things that really matter:

In programming, if you have a fundamental knowledge of any language, switching to some other language won’t take time.

In my case - I have the fundamental knowledge of programming (JS), stuff like variables, loops, array, functions etc. This year my college started teaching us the C language (it’s the first language taught in my college ) most of the students find it difficult/confusing, but for me learning C took only 2 weeks ( As I knew fundamental concepts).

If you are still confused, choose any language understand the fundamentals, use cases etc and you will be good to go.

Below is the link to the CS50 course of Havard which will get you started by teaching the fundamentals-

Link

If you want to learn JS / Python freeCodeCamp.org is the best place with huge community support.

Feel free to share your thoughts below.

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Hi. Kudos for what you’re doing, but we don’t allow people to use the freeCodeCamp forum for promotional purposes. If you would like to be one of the developer authors for Free Code Camp News, you can find everything you need to know in the Publication Style Guide, or read here about how to contribute to freeCodeCamp’s YouTube channel. Alternatively, you can find everything else about contributing to Free Code Camp in the contributing docs.

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My intention was not to promote anything, I am sorry for that link I saw an editor gave the same link so I thought even I can give it.

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Let me talk with the moderator team. We’ve been inconsistent with if we allow ‘blog style’ posts, but we generally disallow them. We should make a consistent rule and stick to it.

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I get it can you please tell me in what style should I write the topic ? What I understand is I should be submitting blog type post to FFC publication, Am I right? I thought my topic was unlisted due to the link.

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Yeah, usually I recommend that people submit these article type posts to the publication process. That way you get the benefit of having an editor help make the post as good as possible.

‘Blog style’ posts aren’t really the intention of the forum, as I understand it, but I’ve started a discussion with the team to see what approach we want to take with these sorts of posts.

In the past, I have done big replies to questions other people have posted and then linked back to those replies in topics with similar questions as appropriate when I see similar questions.

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The moderator team chatted a bit. Here is our advice when it comes to blog style posts on the forum:

Hello there,

Good job researching this post, and putting it together. Unfortunately, the freeCodeCamp forum is not a great platform for articles like this. Our community members come to the forum to ask questions, and to engage in conversation. I’ve unlisted your post, but I encourage you to share it on a platform that is better designed for sharing informational content. freeCodeCamp News has several guides on writing and publishing technical articles. Here are just a few:

If you are an experienced writer, and would like to be one of the developer authors for freeCodeCamp News, you can find everything you need to know in the Publication Style Guide.

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