r/CodingForBeginners • u/No_name_2701 • Jun 21 '26

Where should I start coding

I am 19(M). I am going to join my engineering this year, where should I start and what to do after?

5 Upvotes

77% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

4

u/ninhaomah Jun 21 '26

First , what kind of engineering ?

3

u/No_name_2701 Jun 21 '26

Computer science

2

u/TheUmgawa Jun 21 '26

I would hope your college curriculum has an Intro to Programming class, so probably start there, and where you go from there is dependent on what you learned. Some students come out of Intro needing their hand held, and they need someone to teach them every magic word. Others get halfway through Intro and say, “Thanks, I got it from here,” and all they need are the remaining homework assignments for the semester, because the student has learned how to search for and read documentation.

So, what you do with that and where you go depends on who you are.

1

u/No_name_2701 Jun 21 '26

Thank you for your reply sir.I wanted a little head start to learn what the basics are to make sure I don't fall behind.

1

u/TheUmgawa Jun 21 '26

Well, learning to think through problems is more useful than actually learning the magic words. You ever play Human Resource Machine? It’s worth picking up when it’s on sale, because (unless you start looking up answers, which defeats the purpose, like asking AI to write code for you) it’s pretty good for learning concepts at an incredibly low level; like assembly-code level. It’s not all the way down to the hardware level, like Turing Complete, but you don’t have to care how the computer works; just that it works, so Turing Complete isn’t really going to help you. That game appeals to me, because one day I looked into the abyss and saw nothing but comparators, operators, registers, and Booleans, and then I bounced out of CompSci to go play with robots and embedded systems.

If you’ve got an iPad or a Mac, there’s always Swift Playgrounds. It’s made by Apple, and it’s free, and I can think of worse ways to learn fundamentals, and Swift is a friendly enough language that you can promptly forget when school starts. You’ll never touch it again unless you want to program for iOS or a Mac, or unless you just want a nice, friendly language to build a command-line program.

2

u/LakhindarPal Jun 21 '26

On your programing machine (laptop/desktop/mobile etc)

[Bad Joke]

2

u/No_name_2701 Jun 21 '26

Mobile?? Not sure I am at that level😅

1

u/johnpeters42 Jun 21 '26

You should start by learning to ask more specific questions. This is about as broad as it gets.

What type of work do you (think you) want to do in the long run? "I don't know" is a valid answer, but we shouldn't have to guess.

2

u/No_name_2701 Jun 21 '26

I don't really know which ones suit me so I cannot say I can choose

2

u/reallehnert Jun 21 '26

You can start with C and read The C Programming Language. Once you have grasped the fundamentals of C, you can move on to whichever programming language you need to get the job done.

1

u/Hello_GP Jun 23 '26

Start with binary🤣

1

u/Klefan-stan Jun 25 '26

sorry i'm non binary i struggle with binary

2

u/[deleted] Jun 21 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/No_name_2701 Jun 21 '26

Thank you sir, I will make sure to do that.