Thinking Like a Programmer

I am reading, Thinking Like a Programmer by Anton Spraul and the first few sentences say:

You’re not alone. I have taught programming for over 15 years, and most of my students would have fit this description at some point in their instruction. We will call the missing skill problem solving, the ability to take a given problem description and write an original program to solve it. This describes me a lot of the time, especially on the last Treehouse assignment.

I looked over some of the code today and realized while some of that stuff looked foreign to me after I downloaded the solution, taking my time and actually writing some pseudocode and breaking the problem down could have actually helped me figure it out.

When I was at Pitt learning Java I often struggled understanding a large problem and actually looking at it as a whole. Karen Bigrigg, my Intro professor, actually taught us the Divide and Conquer method of programming which is basically an algorithm for breaking down a problem into smaller pieces and dealing with them that way. In this instance, it may or may not fit for what I am trying to do, but it essentially is the way programming works, in general.

I tend to get stuck looking at the whole problem. Perhaps writing pseudocode or looking at one feature at a time when building my contacts app, workflows, etc would make me less afraid of the code editor.

For instance, Free Code Camp does a good job of preparing you for projects you are about to build, and the Research, Google, Ask methodology they implement is a pretty important skill for any developer, junior or otherwise.

I’ve gone into the CodePen challenges quite ready for them, even though they’ve been pretty simple so far, not really requiring any JavaScript at all 2. I know they’ll get more difficult but I feel like out of Treehouse and Free Code Camp, Free Code Camp prepares you much better. I use Treehouse to shore up some knowledge and Free Code Camp to become better.

I am reading, Thinking Like a Programmer by Anton Spraul and the first few sentences say:

You’re not alone. I have taught programming for over 15 years, and most of my students would have fit this description at some point in their instruction. We will call the missing skill problem solving, the ability to take a given problem description and write an original program to solve it. This describes me a lot of the time, especially on the last Treehouse assignment.

I looked over some of the code today and realized while some of that stuff looked foreign to me after I downloaded the solution, taking my time and actually writing some pseudocode and breaking the problem down could have actually helped me figure it out.

When I was at Pitt learning Java I often struggled understanding a large problem and actually looking at it as a whole. Karen Bigrigg, my Intro professor, actually taught us the Divide and Conquer method of programming which is basically an algorithm for breaking down a problem into smaller pieces and dealing with them that way. In this instance, it may or may not fit for what I am trying to do, but it essentially is the way programming works, in general.

I tend to get stuck looking at the whole problem. Perhaps writing pseudocode or looking at one feature at a time when building my contacts app, workflows, etc would make me less afraid of the code editor.

For instance, Free Code Camp does a good job of preparing you for projects you are about to build, and the Research, Google, Ask methodology they implement is a pretty important skill for any developer, junior or otherwise.

I’ve gone into the CodePen challenges quite ready for them, even though they’ve been pretty simple so far, not really requiring any JavaScript at all 2. I know they’ll get more difficult but I feel like out of Treehouse and Free Code Camp, Free Code Camp prepares you much better. I use Treehouse to shore up some knowledge and Free Code Camp to become better.