3 Mistakes every Beginner Programmers should be Mindful of

We always want to pick "the best" be it software, programming language, tutorials etc. But it took a lot of my time and energy that in the end I just called the day off even before I started.

I will tell you the mistakes I made, what I'm doing now and what I think you should do instead.

1. Programming Language

I tried C because I heard it's the fastest. Then C++ because C is too old and is not object oriented. I skipped java, then came python. I loved it to the core.

But the same thing again, it's slow said someone. It's easy but over hyped said the other. I wanted to know the best of both worlds, then came Julia with speed and simplicity. But wait Julia is a new language and does not have many libraries. Well I did what I always do, started the hunt again. You get my point. All this drained me and just kept me away from programming.

What am I using now?

I'm learning Web Development so I decided to stick with JavaScript and I still love python

What should you do?

There's no best, each one has it's use case, so start with something JavaScript and python are widely recommended. Learn the basic programming concepts and then think of which one to choose.

2. Text editor vs IDE

Regardless of the Programming Language this is more of a personal choice, if you used Linux you know the VIM vs Emacs thing. Trust me I used all of them VIM, Neovim, Emacs, ONI, spacemacs, Sublime text, Atom, VScode, Brackets, Spider, Jupyter notebook, Jupyter lab, Pycharm you name it, I tried it.

Where did it get me? Nowhere! (Not the celestial head from Guardians of Galaxy)

What am I using now?

I use Vscodium, it's VScode without Microsoft proprietary code. If you install VScode from Microsoft it's not OpenSource as they do not reveal hat they add to it.

I also use Jupyter notebook depending on what I'm doing, but VScodium works for me.

What should you do?

If you still learning then stick to VScode/VScodium as it's painless, simple and a lot of tutorials are made using it. If you have some experience you can move on to VIM or sublime or what ever and see if you can make your workflow faster with it.

3. Tutorial Hell

I keep watching videos tutorials, checking out new technologies trying it out, then coming back to another one realizing it's not something I can understand at the moment and I feel like I cant do something without a video guide. This is called Tutorial Hell.

What am I doing now?

I'm trying to avoid video's whenever possible. Also learning using simple games is super cool.

What should you do?

Try textual tutorials with a lot of hands on exercises like FreeCodeCamp. "You should practice", which is a pretty common thing to hear. Practicing using games such as flexboxfroggy etc is the best way.