Learn Programming on a Need to Nerd Basis

[administrator]

Hi,

One of the things I teach is that you can't know it all as a programmer ... it is literally impossible since new frameworks and libraries come out all the time. 

The key to being an effective developer/programmer is to:

1. Learn the core language(s).
2. Learn the most popular framework for the language of choice.
3. Do the equivalent of 'hello world' for some choice libraries that are popular.

Notes:

If you are learning the web stack, you have to learn:

1. HTML5
2. CSS3
3. JavaScript

... Now you have to pick a server side programming technology. For example:

1. PHP
2. JavaScript/Node
3. Python
4. Java
5. Ruby

And finally, a server side web framework ... some examples:

1. PHP Laravel
2. Java Spring
3. Python Django
4. Ruby Rails

Etc ...

Concentrate on your framework of choice and build simple web apps. I should mention, you have to learn databases as well. Pick a relational database like MySQL and learn to ever important SQL database language.

Once you have the above down, then you can go explore things like jQuery, BootStrap, ReactJS etc ... But only very superficially. The goal when looking at these extra libraries is to just understand what they are used for. Nothing more. 

Now, when I project comes up, you will know which library might work for you at that time. And if you find for example, jQuery could be useful, then your nerd-need has come and it's time learn enough jQuery to solve that programmatic problem. 

Stefan Mischook