The beginners guide to programming

So you want to learn programming? You (might) have come to the right place

First of all, your path of success to learning programming is different compared to the language you want to learn, and the language depends on what you want to do. Learning how to code can take either a long or short time.

1. Know what you want to do:

Where to go is very different compared to the language you want to learn. 

First of all, decide thing you want to work with, examples would be web, software, etc. 

Then, decide what you want to work with within that category.

An example of this process could be: Web development -> Frontend/design

2. Find your way of learning:

Now that you know what you want to learn, its time to narrow your way of learning down.

The three usual once are as following: Experimenting, video, text

The experimenting part is, in my opinion mandatory. From my experience with everyone I know that know programming, didn't learn anything unless they tried stuff. But you want to either learn by text, or voice and video. If you don't know which one you like the more, you should try both and find the thing helping you the most.

3. Select your stream of learning:

Here I will involve the thing I have tried or know someone who have tried and approve of. For anything else you can probably Google the language or the thing you want to work with and find the best language to use in your case. There are other ways of learning the language than I write, but to shorten this down I will only add a couple of guides.

Game Development:

I would personally recommend Unreal Engine which uses C++.

Learn the basics of C++ on Microsoft Virtual Academy or CPlusPlus.com's tutorial

Then use Unreal Engines own tutorials

Web Development:

If you want to learn frontend (design) I would recommend the guides on either Codecademy or W3schools

If you want to do backend, learn simple CSS, HTML and maybe a little JavaScript.

Then either do PHP on Codecademy.

Or ASP.NET Core on Microsoft Virtual Academy.

Software Development:

Selecting what language to use for software development is very hard, because there are just too many. I will just link guides to C++ and C# as those are my personal favorites.

I would recommend to learn both C++ and C# on Microsoft Virtual Academy.

App Development:

Depending on if you want to make apps for iOS or Android, you need to learn different languages.

Android:

I would recommend learning Kotlin.

Another supported lang is Java (not to be confused with Javascript)

iOS: 

I would recommend learning Swift.

Another supported lang is Xcode

4. Tips and Tricks:

Don't be afraid to try other things. I have personally tried alot of languages, many of which I don't like, but I don't know if I like it before I tried it.

If you are working on a larger project, make sure to think about how easy the code is to work with at a later time.

Don't hardcode anything. Instead of typing 5 alot of times, make a variable called Number, and make it 5 so you can easily change it to 6, or 7.

Keep your code consistent. If you use camelCase in some part, don't use PascalCase later in that same code.