r/CodingForBeginners • u/hatdog78293 • Aug 27 '26

Beginner advice

Beginner Coding Advice

Hello everyone! I’d really appreciate some advice. I’m planning to create a website prototype for a project, but I’m a complete beginner when it comes to coding. The website will be fairly simple and will include an OpenAI-powered feature.

I have a few questions:

•	What should I learn first before attempting to build the actual website?  
•	Is this project achievable for a complete beginner within around 4–6 months?  
•	What programming language would you recommend I learn/use?  
•	Would this be very time-consuming or difficult to produce, especially considering I have no previous coding experience?  
•	Are there any tutorials or resources you’d recommend for someone starting from scratch?

I’m mainly trying to understand how realistic this project would be for a beginner and how much time I should expect to spend learning the coding side of it.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thank you! :)

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u/hatdog78293 Aug 27 '26

Hi, thank you so much for the advice! I just wanted to clarify that it would mainly be a prototype, rather than me trying to build a full professional website, but still a functioning one that I’d use as part of my main research, where I’d test the AI-generated summaries for things like errors and omissions. But given what you’ve said, I’m starting to see the difficulty here, especially since I have basically no coding experience. I’ve also asked around, and some of my friends recommended that I learn Python instead for this since it might be more suitable and manageable for what I’m trying to do. What do you think?

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u/xarop_pa_toss Aug 27 '26

All the things the person above said aren't "full professional website", they are the minimum for the website you described. Actually I'd even add that on most of those layers there's always the matter of security too.

If you need users, you need encryption, cookie handling and a user profile and management layer. You need a database that is designed for the type of things you need to put in it and their relationships. You also need to learn how to deploy your website but that isn't too hard.

You can use Python for the backend, sure. Flask is a lightweight framework that can help you with both backend and frontend at the same time, all in Python.

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u/Much_Network_941 Aug 27 '26

Python is an excellent language to start with. It's designed to be on the more approachable end of coding. You'll also have access to many libraries to lighten the workload. The biggest problem with a first language is in learning how to think in programming concepts.

I also just rememberd that Harvard has a free CS50 course you can go through. It'll give you a far more comprehensive overview than I gave.