How to Learn Programming

Setting Goals

Setting clear goals is essential when learning programming, as they provide direction and purpose to your learning journey. What is a good goal? Do you want to get a job, or are you learning for fun?

If your focus is to become a full-stack developer, it's crucial to target a job in the field. You should focus on specific skills and technologies. For example, you should learn languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and frameworks like React and Django.

Fundamental Concepts

JavaScript

• Variables (let, const, var)
• Data types (strings, numbers, arrays, objects)
• Functions (declaration, expression, arrow functions)
• Scope (global, local, block)
• Closures
• Hoisting
• Promises & Async/Await
• Event Loop & Call Stack
• DOM Manipulation
• ES6+ Features (destructuring, spread/rest operators, template literals)
• Modules (import/export)

React

• State
• Props
• Virtual DOM
  
• JSX
• Components (functional & class-based)
• Hooks (useState, useEffect, useContext, etc.)
• Single Page Application (SPA)

Django

• Views
• Models
• Templates
• Forms
• URLs
• Database queries
• Admin site

Practicing Your Skills

Following the understanding of basic concepts, it's time to practice your skills by applying your knowledge to build real applications:

• Build or update a model (Django)
• Build a Login Component (React)
  
• Write an async function to fetch all users from the database (JavaScript)
• Write a view to respond with a list of users' names (Django)

Testing Your Knowledge

It's crucial to test yourself by practicing specific skills, focusing on understanding the syntax of your code and the combination of patterns. Testing your knowledge by taking assessments helps measure your progress and provides feedback on what areas to improve.

Expanding Your Skillset

Knowing JavaScript, React, and Django (Python) alone may not be enough to land a job as a junior web developer. You should keep adding more concepts and skills to your toolbox, such as:

• Git
• How to write documentation
• Deployment pipelines
• Frameworks (Django, Next.js)
• State management (React)
• Authentication and Authorization
• Testing (Backend & Frontend)
• CORS
• SQL & NoSQL Databases

Conclusion

Practicing programming involves combining knowledge, concepts, and facts with applying skills such as writing code, using version control like Git, and documenting your work. Consistently testing concepts and engaging in hands-on coding practice are essential for reinforcing your learning in programming.