When you are learning to code one of the biggest choices you will make is to find out the right programming language for you. A way for you to instruct the computer, to build out your programs, to create algorithms, to solve problems. While most people in my college choose Python, JavaScript, C, C++, Java to start out with their programming journey. This is a very important question to answer. As you can read on our website, these are the highest paid programming languages out there. Once you select the programming language that you want to start with, in my case that was Java, the next step for you to take is to actually learn the language, right? And if you just go and search on YouTube, you will find tons of videos that you can watch and then you can try to imitate what the person is trying to teach you. Well that is working for a lot of people. But its not the most effective way to learn to code.
And so in today’s article, I want to share with you one of the best ways for you to learn any programming language for completely free. Not by watching some lectures, not by watching someone type out some stuff and then you just copying the same thing but by solving actual questions and doing it in a fun way so that you don’t get bored. It’s going to be amazing. You’re going to love it. Let’s just go ahead and discuss this way for you to learn code free!!
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How to use Exercism to learn to code –
This helpful resources called as Exercism.org. Let me actually show you how this actually works. So as you can see this is Exercism.org. It’s a completely free non for profit organizations that you can use to learn over 55 different programming languages. It doesn’t mean that you need to learn all of them but it has a wide variety of languages that you can learn by solving out problems, by just trying things out, by practicing in general. It has hints, it has some amazing features, the UI is brilliant. Let me show you exactly all about this.
So as you can see, when you go to the languages track right here you will be able to find out all of these different programming languages. So let’s just say that you want to start out with Python, so you search for Python. Here is Python and they have a learning mode for Python over here. So what is happening here is that it first of all gives you a brief idea about what Python is and how can you start learning Python. Here is the syllabus that you need to follow. So as you can see, they’ve broken things down into various categories. First of all, you need to learn about the basics of Python. How does this programming language really work? This is the first part. The second part would be maybe learning about numbers how does Booleans work? What are conditionals? What are strings? What are comparisons? And as you can see, all of these have these circles. These are actually problems that you will be solving.
Learn by solving actual problems –
For example, Convert a long phrase into its acronym. So maybe the input for this would be Shark Tank India and the output could be as STI, something like that. So this is basically how it works. At the end they also have an interesting insight that you will be having in every single module. So you have strings, comparisons, less string methods. You learn about all the ways to store data and then as you go down it also talks about classes. This is everything that you need to know about Python as a programming language. And once you know this, you can build programs for yourself. How cool is that and this is completely free.
I will give you an example of how this actually looks. So as you can see I have logged in for this and I will just click on join the Python track. So once I click on this, I can now start solving all of these problems. All of these are locked. I have to start with the first one which is going to be just a simple hello world problem right here, so I’ll just click over here and now I can read all the instructions and I can then just start in the editor. This one says return, so I will just see here Hello World. And that’s all that I need to do right here. And at the end I can also just declare this function right here or else it would not work. And then I can click on submit. So as you can see the first one is passed. It’s a very simple question. We can then move on to the next part.
This is all that you need to do to learn step by step, all of the different things in a programming language. For example, if you want to go towards a dashboard, you can track all the progress that you have. Similarly, they also have tracks for JavaScript. So if I just click on here, I can take a look at all the problems I need to solve in this JavaScript track. You can look at the syllabus, exactly what I need to learn in JavaScript to become a JavaScript developer. You need to first learn about the basics of this language. Then we’ll go into numbers, arithmetic operations, strings, booleans, and then we’ll sort of move on to arrays, conditionals, comparisons, increment-decrement operators, for-loops, while loop, statements, objects, and then we can go on and on to learn about functions and closures and other things in this language itself.
Inheritance and Promises at the very end. So as you can see, it’s a very much visual kind of a website that you can visit. You can learn by actually practicing and implementing whatever it is. Start your learning over here. You can do this for all the other languages that are available on this platform as well. You can take a look at the exercises over here that are available for you to solve.
Let’s say you try to solve a comparatively hard exercise right here. You are not able to actually solve it so you can take a look at hints. You can take a look at solutions and you can get better.
What more does Exercism offers us?
It’s not just the main popular languages, they have a ton of other languages for you to explore as well. For example we have C, C sharp, C++. By the way, C sharp, you can use to become a game developer if you want and we can go down and we can take a look at other languages like we have Dart. You can learn Java, you can learn Kotlin. You can learn all of these other languages, PHP for example, Perl, SQL. Basically you can learn about all of these languages on this work platform itself.
You can become an iOS developer by just learning Swift. This is what you can do on Exercism.
I hope this article is interesting. Go try out this platform and tell me what you think in the comment section.
This article has a great information. I will apply it to my daily Spanish classes.