Hey, my name is Mini.
I don't know how to start this post off properly since this is my first post here, but I shall start it anyway.
I am 15 (turning 16 in a couple of months) and recently started to get into coding. A big influence of mine is my big Brother :D He is 6 years older than me and also has about 5 - 6 more years of experience than me, so I'm sure he will help me along this journey of learning to code. He wants to become a game dev in the future and I think that I would like to also become a game developer or software engineer in the future. I decided to start learning the basics of web development last week with things like HTML, CSS and I hope to soon start learning JavaScript. I already know a basic amount about coding/programming and game development stuff through my big Bro and because my whole life I have been interested in technology and gaming.
Anyway, sorry for that jumbled introduction that probably didn't even explain why I am writing this.
I am writing this post because I don't know where to really start, or what to look forward to in the coming months of learning code. What languages do you think I should be learning primarily? Are there any great sources to help me and increase my learning? (Especially now I have more time because of COVID.)
I am currently learning HTML & CSS through YT tutorials, and I am also going to continue learning the latter via Codecademy. Also, my Brother has said that it would be good for me to start learning JS on Codecademy as well. I have heard that freeCodeCamp() is also a really good source of learning, however, it looks to be way more complex and detailed, meaning that there would be a lot more stuff for me to learn. I have also started to learn GitHub because I know that it will be extremely useful in the future.
Coding or Game Developing isn't even my only dream though.
I want to become a comedian and maybe an actor, but another one of my dreams is that I love games, and coding. And because I have time to start learning to code now, I thought this would be a great place for me to come for any pointers or suggestions to help me.
I think I know that Java and C++, for example, are some of the best and most complex languages for game developing. I know that it would take me time to learn them, and I don't know if there are any special things that I need to get to use them.
Sorry for this very jumbled post, basically in conclusion:
I want to get into coding/maybe web development but really more into game development. Are there any key things that I should stick to and know? If so, it would be awesome if anyone could help me and point me in the right direction :D
P.S I also have recently installed Sublime for my HTML & CSS stuff, but I also got VS Code because I heard that it is very good. But I have also heard that Visual Studio is great as well, so I don't know whether to have VS Code or Visual Studio or both?
Anyway, thank you for taking your time to read this :)
Top comments (1)
Greetings, and welcome to the wild world of Software Engineering.
Sublime is a good text editor, but it's never been my favorite. I use VSCode for my daily driver now, and before that I used a random jumble of other editors / IDEs (none of which I use anymore). I've written extensions for VSCode, which is not something I can say that I've done before.
Free code camp is a pretty solid resource for learning the web development world; I've never personally gone through it, but I have looked at it to help a friend of mine when he was learning so it gets my broadest stamp of approval (i.e. I can't speak for how good each granular part is, but on a whole it seems fine).
Java is not really used in games as far as I am aware outside of perhaps mobile games, but most games I see now tend to be built in some other game engine and ported over (Unity had this ability, unsure if they still do).
If you plan on staying in the web world, understanding the Javascript ecosystem (and how it pertains to Node.js) will be critical for creating websites.
Other than that, having also been younger learning programming myself, I would give you one bit of advice: always try to build something, even if you don't feel like you know how to do all of it at the start. Necessity is the mother of education, and I learned quite a bit by simply finding a problem I didn't know how to solve. DO NOT just build things that you know, 100%, that you can.
Otherwise Dev.to is a great place to come to for some broader discussions, and StackOverflow is a great place to ask for very specific code help (note: you should supply code to illustrate your attempt to solve the problem -- they do not take kindly to you simply asking for code that does something).
Reach out if you have any questions!