How did /g/ keep motivated learning to code? I'm on my third

>>55694778
I did. But I have a bad habit of wanting to know how to code in like a day and then get depressed when I can't, thinking I'm wasting my time. Then I try again, same shit. I guess it's all about the frame of mind. You have to be willing to put in the short term effort for long term gains. You just need to teach yourself you're not going to understand everything in a day and your code will look like spaghetti, but that's only natural.
Don't be like me anon.
Keep going.

>>55694778
well my desire was to understand how a computer operates as well as a computer program.i guess thirst for knowledge but also probably a search for respect in some way as well as a way to be independent of my parents and make my own money.

its hard to motivate yourself to learn the language, especially when at the beginning you're not actually writing any "poetry" you're just learning english.

i just remember starting programs and not being able to quit until i finished them, or an important module. so try to make the jump to writing your own programs as soon as possible.

if you're looking for fun exercises which will allow you to write some "poetry" rather than just learn the language itself, try making a simple game or doing some project euler stuff.

push it. computers are the greatest invention probably in our history. learning to program them is real contribution.

just like my hentai rape games are a real contribution to society.

>>55694778
Rome wasn't built in a day op. keep plugging away and before you know it you will have amassed a wealth of knowledge

>third day
>Already wants to give up
It's called discipline, faggot.

complete digital design, 500 pages of hobbyist tier circuitry knowledge. boring? fuck yes. difficult? not as bad as calculus. why? because goals.

EYES ON THE PRIZE, FUTURE CHANPION.

>>55694778
Programming clearly isn't for you, give up.

Learn with a goal of making something, learn why you need to build it.

3 days is nothing though, maybe you're not cut out for this.

>>55694778
>How did /g/ keep motivated learning to code? I'm on my third day
Come back when it's your 300th day.

>>55694778
>I'm on my third day, spent two days actively reading six hours, plus coding It all.

don't expect to keep that phase up. if you want to get good programming knowledge you have to keep coming back to it from time to time out of curiosity.

it's this long term perseverance that keeps you going, don't force yourself to code boring shit for long hours because some book or site says so, you will end up hating it and never going back to it again.

instead find something you think it would be interesting to code. don't compromise on it's quality, make sure the good looks good, that it respects a coding style, that it is scalable, modular, has a nice user interface (not necessary a graphical one), etc.

when i started coding i used to write small programs that would generate prime numbers. i liked toying around with loops, functions, trying different optimizations and see how they would affect the running time

after you start to get higher level concepts (OOP for example) you should have something practical that you want to learn. i really wanted to learn GUI programming. i barely had a good knowledge of how OOP works and i couldn't even compile a GUI framework like Qt. i ended up following a WinAPI tutorial for GUI. later i learned more about actually compiling stuff and i managed to compile WxWidgets and started writing stuff in it. i was terrible at first because i had knowledge of OOP but not an understanding of it. in the end i learnt by trying. it is difficult to take the "synthetic" knowledge you get from books/tutorials and apply it in practice

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>>55694778
did you just buy a book and started the excercises?

While this may be one way of learning it, that way might just not be for you.

Instead, dunno what you're learning but for instance I started with HTML, so my go-to "own" project was personal website. Then you don't do the excercises but instead think about what you want to do, then you google how to do it and fucking do it.

Most other languages this might turn into "copy and paste from stack-overflow" but once you get to the point where you googled that shortcut the third time, you might as well remember that shit.

Another thing you'll have to go through is debugging hell.
You have to spend at least 24 hours combined in looking for one stupid fucking error your debugger or error message didn't point you to, usually a missing semicolon in PHP or something, to really start the "recheck when you write" mode.

I'm not a pro coder, but i've written my 200k lines of PHP and some perl and python to at least tell you a tale about scripting languages.

Anything OOP or bigger, ask a nerd. But I imagine it to be similar.

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>>55696887
>>55694778

btw if you need ideas, there's always the isntall gentoo wiki at google.internet

>>55696887
I'm kind of like that. I started learning Python some months ago, the first month I searched the whole internet for guides and tutorials. Did exercises, read books, the whole package. But it started to water down, I didn't have the same enthusiasm, I became demotivated with failures and lack of knowledge. And now I keep coming back to it, trying something, failing and giving up for some time. I don't want to give up anymore.
I can do the basis stuff from online courses, exercises and short CLI programs, but I can't do anything more advanced. It feels like there's a giant mountain I need to climb and I don't even know how to tie a knot.
Is there some sort of book or tutorial that grabs my hand and help me at this stage? Like, it teaches how to use some new modules, gives examples, just to build my confidence. I know I can go on my own after I get more confidence and experience, but now I'm just kind of lost.

With this Pokemon GO fad, I started replaying the old Pokemon games and really got interested in making something similar, my own 2D RPG. I searched some game engines and libaries, but since I want to learn stuff first, I wanted to do it with Python/Pygame, but I can barely start, and I wouldn't like to just clone something for someone else.

>>55698501
try something more basic and technical like plotting mathematical functions in a window and try to plan how to do this in steps like this:
1. figure out how to make an window in python
2. figure out how to draw basic stuff on a window
3. figure out how to draw points at positions computed by a mathematical function
4. figure out how to draw connected lines instead of points
5. extra stuff that you find interesting like a grid on every unit of the axis, zoom or offset control, etc

people who don't have a lot of experience with programming always shoot to high, they dream about making videogames from scratch, apps that will make millions on google play or some complex website.
this is because they don't understand how difficult those project could get. those projects require not only programming knowledge but also discipline, understanding of different concepts, making design choices, knowing how to keep things simple and readable and making user interfaces

maybe the most important thing to get as a beginner is breaking a task apart in smaller tasks and thinking in steps. for example a 2D RPG requires some rendering/drawing component, some way of describing every game entity (OOP comes into play here), some glue between entities to implement mechanics and game logic, input handling, saving/loading (aka serialization/deserialization)

i thing that helped me get good at programming was that i didn't like to think this far, but i loved to understand basic things and piecing them together to create something more complex

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>>55698501
Let me give you the most obvious advice you could pay some professional business planner thousands of dollars for:

Break your goal down into pieces.
And in your case, not pieces you yourself thought of, but rather ALL the different pieces you see, and start to write down requirements.

So you want to make a game. A game needs:
- graphics and music and shit
- some sort of control about where in the game you are, what legal and illegal moves are
- basically a GUI to be accessible to a player

and now you go and
- google any word you don't know
- break down anything you don't know how to program from scratch

until ultimately you'll have a LARGE FUCKING chunk of little tasks you can just work on.

Or you go the path of the smart engineer and look for open source games - and then look at the goddamn sources and try to explain each part. If you can't - learn, ask, look around until you can.

>>55698699
>i thing that helped me
*a thing that helped me

>>55694778
>Third day
>reading for 6 hours plus exercises
Don't spend six fucking hours of your day reading and programming but keep up with maybe two hours a day of reading/programming exercises, less if you're not feeling it. Nut the fuck up, though. If you're still feeling like this a few months in, either:

a) Find out how to do something (simple) YOU want to do; make your life easier somehow or have a clone of a popular program tailored the way you want it. I know some guy here has been making his own media player even though there are plenty of functional ones around. Maybe don't make a media player, but do something like learn how to get input from a user to slap into a spreadsheet to track your spending over a month.

or

b) Find something that you or someone else at work or school would like to be able to do with a computer and learn how to do it: for example, at work I'm doing some skiddie-level GUI automation in Python for automated email distribution since I can't directly access our SQL database (we don't host our own stuff at work).

>>55694876
This. When I started my first company I coded every day for 6-10 hours for 3 months straight.

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>>55699088
oh god fucking this. Knowing some PERL will literally make you GOD in any typing-heavy environment, even more if it involves anything with invoices.

I have to make some dummy files now and then and they all need increments in there but outside of that are all the same. There was usually some poor intern appointed to manually type all that shit, but when I revealed I need 5 minutes to write up a script you just have to punch in a start and an end number to automatically spit that shit out neatly divded by line breaks, I actually got a fucking raise and am treated like some elite hacker by all the friendly older accountant ladies and men who right-click to copy shit.

>>55694778
Because I found it fun and I was self-motivated. Also, for the first programming language I learned, I didn't try to self-teach. I took a short class instead.

>>55698699
>>55698734
I love you guys. I'll search some open source games and try to understand what's happening.
Should I keep using Python?

>>55694778
When you're passionate about something, giving up is never even an option. I just spent ~80% of the the last 4 days debugging some C code that was having major problems. Most nights not going to bed until 3 am, then waking up early to get started finding what was wrong. When you finally find that nagging bug, it feels better than crack. I believe in you OP. Just hang in there.

>>55698458
ROLLING

>>55694778
Turn off your Internet router for a week