Question: How long did it take you to learn how to code?

Oliver Brown answered on 7 Mar 2015:

In my case I would say maybe a month or two of working through a book at the weekends and some evenings — not very long really! Personally I began with Java, although I would probably recommend Python as a better starting place if you’re interested.

One thing that’s important to know is that there are about a million billion programming languages out there and they’re all slightly different! It’s not really learning a particular programming language that’s important though, it’s learning how to program. Learning how to program means learning how to break down a problem in to smaller tasks in a logical way, and learning how to structure your code so that it can be easily understood and fixed, or updated. This is a skill that mostly comes with practice and is one I’m still learning!

Once you’ve identified the goal of your program, and the individual tasks that must be completed, it’s just a question of writing the code to do it — and you can pretty much pick whatever language you like! Although some are better at some tasks than others…