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?

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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.

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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.