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General Discussion

Posted by kristoffer haug
kristoffer haug
105 Points

If you are totally new to Coding, and just signed up for treehouse. Were should/the best way to start? :)

Coming from a person with no, whatsoever knowledge about coding.

5 Answers

Michal Martinek
PLUS
Michal Martinek
Courses Plus Student 476 Points
Michal Martinek
Michal Martinek
Courses Plus Student 476 Points

You should decide, what you want exactly do and choose one track from offer.

If you want make websites, so choose Front End Web Development or Web Design, which is more focused on design, look and feel :-)

Happy coding.

kristoffer haug
kristoffer haug
105 Points

Thanks for answering!

Andrew Jensen-Battaglia
Andrew Jensen-Battaglia
10,051 Points
Andrew Jensen-Battaglia
Andrew Jensen-Battaglia
10,051 Points

If you signed up, Treehouse should have asked you some basic questions about what type of programming career path you'd like to pursue. Based on your input, Treehouse will put you on specific track to follow and whichever track you're on should begin with basic beginner courses.

If you're uncertain as to what career you'd like to pursue and you just want to start programming in general, I might suggest starting with HTML/CSS as they're simple and easy to pick up with no prior coding knowledge. From there you could work your way on to JavaScript.

kristoffer haug
kristoffer haug
105 Points

Uncertain as to what career i would like to pursue and just want to start programming in general is pretty much spot on. Thanks for the advice!

John Magee
PLUS
John Magee
Courses Plus Student 9,058 Points
John Magee
John Magee
Courses Plus Student 9,058 Points

If you want to program, I would not start with HTML/CSS. HTML and CSS are not programming languages. They are used for marking up and displaying content on web sites. These are not programming languages.

Don't look at it as the career you want to do but what is it you want to accomplish. The goal you have in mind will guide you. If you have no interest (for instance) in building web sites - HTML/CSS is a waste of your time. There are numerous programming languages here to learn...but if you want to learn programming, my advice would be to find a course in programming fundamentals that is independent of a programming language (most likely you would want an object oriented programming fundamental course).

If you wanted to learn phone apps you would focus on android or Objective C / Swift...if you wanted to learn a programming language that would enable you to use statistical modeling languages (like R) you might want to look into Python or Ruby.

Andrew Jensen-Battaglia
Andrew Jensen-Battaglia
10,051 Points

Acquiring a basic knowledge of HTML/CSS is in no way a waste of time regardless of what you end up doing career-wise. True, it's technically a markup language and not a programming language--still it's a good introduction to syntax rules and basic logic encountered in other programming languages.

Going on the assumption that you don't know what you want to accomplish, as the OP already stated, HTML is a great place to start.

John Magee
PLUS
John Magee
Courses Plus Student 9,058 Points
John Magee
John Magee
Courses Plus Student 9,058 Points

BTW

Treehouse does have an introduction to programming course right here

http://teamtreehouse.com/library/introduction-to-programming

I still advise against HTML and CSS unless you want to build web sites as the fundamentals of programming and the fundamentals of markup have more not in common than in common

Andrew Jensen-Battaglia
Andrew Jensen-Battaglia
10,051 Points
Andrew Jensen-Battaglia
Andrew Jensen-Battaglia
10,051 Points

Keep in mind that the introduction to programming course shared above is outdated. The updated version of this course is here:

http://teamtreehouse.com/library/javascript-basics

Both are essentially an intro to JavaScript, which is a language much more worth knowing if you have a basic understanding of HTML.

Cheers!

John Magee
John Magee
Courses Plus Student 9,058 Points

Thanks for the clarification - I've been back and forth with learning ruby and rails for a very long time and finally just went back to the beginning to try and fill the holes and get where I want to be in both OOP and web development, I just looked at the programming course in the ROR trail - there's also a separate javascript course - if they're the same i'd hope they'd merge them.

kristoffer haug
kristoffer haug
105 Points

I now see from you guys advice, there are different roads to take in the programming world, and it will probably end up an success anyways.

I started at Andrews tip about 30 minutes ago and it have gotten me started, so ill continue with that, and work my way on to Javascript.

Appreciate the feedback from you both.