We will tell you what a college student should know and how to learn to become a coder from scratch.
Programming languages
First, decide on the area where you will work, and only then proceed to choose a language. If you’ve decided on a language and are starting to learn coding in college, you may encounter a number of difficulties, especially with homework. Luckily, services like CodingHomeworkHelp assist students with assignments in various programming languages.
You will probably study C++ in your first years at college. You need to know the following about it. If you have figured out classes and pointers and write all your lab reports in C++, this does not mean you know C++. Many technical nuances exist – undefined behavior, smart pointers, virtual destructors, and much more. You also need to know the main libraries – std and boost. If you don’t know this, you won’t be hired for real jobs, only for an internship, which is not available everywhere. Even professional C++ programmers sometimes complain about the technical complexity of C++.
More modern low-level languages are Rust and Go. There are higher-level languages, such as Java, C#, PHP, and Python. All of them are very common; there is no need to know C++ well. But understanding how things work at a low level is a plus.
Lisp and Prolog languages are not used in their pure form. Functional languages used in practice include Haskell, Scala, Erlang, and F#. However, their share relative to imperative languages is not very large. You need to know that there is such a concept of immutable variables, that it has its advantages, and that programs can also be written in such languages.
We can recommend learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, even if it is not required by the program. The browser has good capabilities for displaying graphics; it is convenient to do laboratory work in it, where a user interface is needed, but no specific programming language is required.
Web programming is very common now; usually, in such projects, there is a database and a server-side language that generates HTML for the browser or returns the necessary data to the browser, and the interface is created using a JavaScript application. The server language can be anything; often, it is one of the ones we wrote above. JavaScript is also used as a server-side language.
For any language, it is important to know not only the language itself but also the common libraries and frameworks for it. They won’t hire you if you don’t know at least one framework.
Database
Databases are widely used. There are quite a few projects where there is no need to store data, and if they do need to be stored, then databases are usually used for this, and not just files. You need to know SQL and be able to work with them. There is no need to know relational theory; no one asks about normal forms. You need to know how to divide data into tables and how to join them through foreign keys. In practice, INNER JOIN and LEFT JOIN are most often used; other forms are not recommended, as they are difficult to understand. In joins, it is better to write only the key equality condition; it is better to write additional conditions in WHERE.
Version control systems
Version control systems are also widely used. The main ones are Git, Mercurial, and SVN. The most common system is Git. They are needed to store change history and track and manage changes, especially when working in a team.
Related disciplines
You don’t need to know physics. It is advisable to have a school-level understanding of basic terms, mainly related to electricity, in order to understand what is being discussed at college.
You don’t need to know mathematics in detail. But studying it shows how well you can make sense of unfamiliar information. You also need to have an idea of the basic concepts, in case you need them somewhere – percentages, sine-cosine, logarithms, matrices.
Separately, it is necessary to note the mathematics associated with the complexity of the algorithms. You need to have an idea of the complexity of algorithms and how they are assessed. It is often asked about at college, as it is one of the ways to test at least some knowledge in the field of IT in a few minutes. You should understand sorting, trees, and graphs. A regular loop is linear complexity, a nested loop is quadratic, and a tree or recursion is usually logarithmic, but it depends on the situation. The best and worst cases may have different levels of complexity. The constant multiplier does not count.
At college, what is more important is not knowledge of something but the ability to study unfamiliar material. Nevertheless, to study, you need to know at least something.
What are the most popular types of programmers?
- A 1C programmer whose immediate tasks include optimizing the finished 1C system and customizing it directly for each enterprise.
- A software engineer who is most often involved in the development of software for industrial automation, they also usually program household appliances. By the way, if you decide to study software engineering but face some difficulties, you’d better seek assistance. For example, you can get software engineering assignment help from experts who have relevant knowledge and experience in the field.
- A game developer who specializes in creating computer games. Game developers are involved in the full life cycle of a video game: creation, testing, development, support, updates, modification, etc.
- Android and iOS developers who create games, software, interfaces, and updates for Apple-branded devices or Android devices.
- A system programmer whose tasks, in addition to developing software modules and their integration, include adaptation and modification of software products for a specific system based on its logic and tasks. They can also develop and administer databases.
- Data Science is considered an advanced area of programming. It combines artificial intelligence and data, allowing forecasting based on statistical data.
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This post brought to you by Atif Sharif
Photo: iStock
