Book Image

Skill Up: A Software Developer's Guide to Life and Career

By : Jordan Hudgens
3 (1)
Book Image

Skill Up: A Software Developer's Guide to Life and Career

3 (1)
By: Jordan Hudgens

Overview of this book

This is an all-purpose toolkit for your programming career. It has been built by Jordan Hudgens over a lifetime of coding and teaching coding. It helps you identify the key questions and stumbling blocks that programmers encounter, and gives you the answers to them! It is a comprehensive guide containing more than 50 insights that you can use to improve your work, and to give advice in your career. The book is split up into three topic areas: Coder Skills, Freelancer Skills, and Career Skills, each containing a wealth of practical advice. Coder Skills contains advice for people starting out, or those who are already working in a programming role but want to improve their skills. It includes such subjects as: how to study and understand complex topics, and getting past skill plateaus when learning new languages. Freelancer Skills contains advice for developers working as freelancers or with freelancers. It includes such subjects as: knowing when to fire a client, and tips for taking over legacy applications. Career Skills contains advice for building a successful career as a developer. It includes such subjects as: how to improve your programming techniques, and interview guides and developer salary negotiation strategies.
Table of Contents (5 chapters)
4
Index

In this chapter, I'm going to discuss how to learn a new programming language. I'll walk you through the five steps that I use whenever I'm learning a new language or framework.

Over the years, I've been hired by organizations such as Learn.co and AppDev to write programming curriculums for:

The only language that I really build applications in is Ruby, which means that I've been forced to become proficient in a number of language that I really didn't have much experience working with, sometimes in a very short period of time. And over the years I've developed a system for learning a new language or framework, and that's what I'm going to walk through in this chapter.

When I'm learning a new programming language I follow these steps:

I've used these five steps for a number of languages and I can also tell you, once you've become proficient in a single language you'll find it's much easier to pick up new programming languages since most of them have quite a bit of shared processes, and all you'll need to do is learn the difference in syntax.

I hope these tips will help you learn a new programming language. Please feel free to write to me with any other methods that you've found helpful when learning, and good luck with the coding!