I have this huge desire to learn programming but its stopped by me not being able to sit down and say “now its studying time” any advice is appreciated.
I have this huge desire to learn programming but its stopped by me not being able to sit down and say “now its studying time” any advice is appreciated.
I don’t have a good answer for the question in the title, but for programming specifically, I’d say try and solve a problem you have instead of studying it. It’s one of those things that’s IMHO much easier to learn by trying things out. Start small. Little things you’d like to automate, annoyances on your computer, things that could be useful for your work, etc.
I find making a simple text based calculator is a good way to test your skills while learning.
Start by adding 2 numbers together and outputting the result.
Then upgrade the calculator by getting the numbers from user input.
Now you get to decide the next upgrade. Does the user want to add 3 numbers? Perhaps they want to subtract instead. Maybe the user wants to start a new calculation immediately after finishing. What about error handling? What should the program do if the user enters something that isn’t a number?
Each step provides new challenges and new learning opportunities.
Make sure to test frequently. The more code you write between tests, the harder it becomes to track down bugs.
This is what seems to work for me. I built a website for a small music festival and wanted to have the same headers across all the pages. I found out that I could write the header in JavaScript and just call it on each page, meaning that updates would only have to be done to one file.
I copied the code from an example I found first, then tweaked it to suit my needs, and then played with adding and removing functions to see what they do. I then copied the format for the footer, and found a few other ways of tweaking the site with JavaScript.
I’m still a long way from being proficient, but I understand a lot more than when I started :)