Staying motivated? Share your story.

[metulburr]

I just started programming -- It isn't that I'm bored, it's just that I was having problems staying motivated. Needing motivation isn't the same as being bored! :D

From the perspective of someone who is just learning to code, it is a daunting task to trudge through the vastness of material on the subject of programming that is out there. On top of that, I've no idea what is good advice or bad, and so I thought that my best bet would be to come to the forums and ask directly. In my searches I have already come across bad advice from people who thought they knew, or from people who were only trying to get a pat on the head, who were called out by others more knowledgeable than they. (A theme of sorts on StackOverflow I noticed during Google searches).

i dont like stackoverflow. I dont like the way they do things. Everyone is competing for the best answer. Here is just discussion. Everyone checks each others answer for precision, and i have been called out many times for being incorrect. And its OK.

the best way to determine if you are getting good or bad advice is to check numerous sources. If one site is saying to use regex to parse websites, and more sites say to use BeautifulSoup, then i would go with the majority. But you can surely tell certain communities do things their own way.

With GUI libraries, there is not really one better than the other. There are pros and cons to each.

To be more specific, I wanted a book to read for offline study. Forgot to mention that, sorry. Something along the lines of textbook material one would use in a classroom. Again, being as new as I am, I've no idea what is good, outdated or whatever the case may be.

This is another one that everyone is going to say a different answer. There is not really one that is the "best". Some people learn different, and what book made programming click for them might not be what you need. Having said that....the book i used to jump start was learning python I still use it as a reference and it sticks by my computer 8 years later (older version)

You can also download some of the free online books for offline use. Check the books section. Try to download a few or so.

For example, I'd would read how to do a FOR or WHILE loop, and then see something related to nested loops and recursion, which would take me to something about regex, which in turn would bring me to memory management and garbage collection. Like when you start out on YouTube watching cat videos, but by the end of the night end up watching flat earth conspiracy theories? Yeah. Like that.

Yeah then you are going to want a book to help keep you on track. A lot of times they will roughly hit something, and then say they will talk about that on X chapter. That is to keep you on track. A free or paid book will go through the fundamentals and keep you on track. Again, dont just read one book, read at least two and compare and contrast. When you get to the point of "yeah i already know everything they are explaining", then its time to move on.