I am a 20 year old male and i am new to this website and also coding as a whole. My goal is to become a game developer however, i am still a beginner regarding coding. Months ago, i have started learning C++. I have downloaded Visual Studio Code and started learning the coding language via a YouTube course by someone named “Bro Code”.
Currently, i am learning “While Loops” and “Do While Loops” which can be found at 1:35:51 (While Loops) and 1:38:56 (Do While Loops).
I think i am making good progress so far. I have my own schedule regarding the YouTube course. Every day in a single week, i practice a part of the course until i master it near the end of the week. For instance, i practiced “Useful String Methods” for a entire week,until i was able to write the string methods without having to watch the video. At that point,i ensure i have “mastered” that part and move onto the next part the following week.
Now, i’d like to ask whether my method of learning is okay and what i should do once i finish Bro Code’s video. Do you guys have any advice? I am still new to this forum and coding as a whole and i would like to hear your perspective on this.
Your approach is promising better progress than just to copy tutorials, and then to fall into a gap, because you didn’t really grasp what you were doing in the project. That’s the path to “tutorial hell”. You are already ahead of many newcomers in this regard.
However, choosing C++ as a first language is brave to be honest, as it forces you, among other things, to manage memory manually. Learn to avoid memory leaks, watch out for array bounds, things that can lead to constant crashes and buffer overflows. Just to name a few pitfalls.
If you find yourself getting stuck with C++, making games with Python can be a great alternative. Until you have enough experience to handle C++. Python is much more forgiving and let’s you focus on learning the basics.
I think the important thing of self-learning programming is that you do a lot of small projects(even meaningless ones). I would do a simple project on every new thing I learned, this is good not just for reenforcing your lessons, but also getting a feel for actually building things. I think the biggest mistake I make starting out was thinking that I had to get better before I could come up with my own projects. I wasn’t until i started throwing things together that I felt that I really started to learn what “programming” is. And just to clarify I mean coming up with your own mini-projects.
Thanks for the reply, just regarding the tutorial, i have made it almost to the half of the video. Do i necessarily need to start over at the beginning and make a project of every part of the video, from namespaces and data types to while loops and do while loops? Since i think it will be a bit overwhelming for me. Also, i don’t know where to start regarding the projects. What do you think?
If you search youtube “comp 4300” you should get some good college level videos and also “the chermo’s” yt channel is good as for projects, they don’t really need to do anything special just make your own function, loop, whatever and try to use multiple things together like make a random string generator or something also if you haven’t yet get a better IDE than visual studio code like Visual studio (they’re two different things) or something that can tell about buffer overflows and memory leaks
Also there’s “suraj sharma” yt channel on sfml and “javidx9” they can be advanced but good if you’re just looking for something to watch