I'm Getting Listless and Worried I'll Lose my Passion

Question

So, I'm almost 100% self taught in programming (save for a course in C after I had already taught myself C). This means that to keep myself programming, I have to be constantly finding materials (i.e. tutorials) on the web (I'm poor). Unfortunately, I've found myself stuck in a sort of limbo, where I understand the basics of programming (in theory, I'm able to grab a new language and get comfortable enough to solve a few Project Euler problems, as is evident by my time spent here) but I'm not able to get any deeper than that, like GUI programming or web interfacing.

I don't know if it's just me, but there seems to be a sort of great divide in terms of the level of difficulty in the tutorials on the internet. All I can find fall under either Maddeningly Easy or Maddeningly Difficult. Are there no intermediate tutorials out there? The kind that say, okay, you've seen this before, here's some code but we'll explain what's happening. But I digress.

Given my lack of ability to breach the practicality gap in terms of programming, I find myself stagnating. I can only teach myself the first six Project Euler problems in so many languages. I need to find something, some sort of project, before my spark dies out. I'm worried about it. I know this is such a broad question, but... can anyone help me out? Point me in some sort of direction?

Answer 1

You need to start making things. You can start out small, but find a project that you can contribute to or that you want to work on yourself.

If you can't think of anything "useful" to make, then start writing simple games: a tetris clone, a top-down shooter, something like that. It doesn't have to have AAA graphics but even a simple game like tetris will teach a lot about the more complex structure of a program, user interface, and that sort of thing. But at the same time there's nothing so complicated than you'll get completely stuck.

Answer 2

A couple of suggestions which I might offer, as they have worked for me in the past, when in the same situation:

1) Get involved in an Open Source Project.

One of the best ways to learn programming is to read/review/refactor code created by other programmers. You learn new tricks, as well as good style guides for formatting your code in later work, and start building a good understanding of a pile of packages which you can roll together to create solutions down the track.

2) (If you aren't already) Get a Job as a Programmer.

The single greatest kind of learning experience I have had when it comes to programming is when I need to extend my skillset to solve a particular problem. Being put in a role where you are given a problem, which, when you start, is beyond your skills and then creating a solution using experimentation, sourcing existing solutions online, referring to documentation, asking a learned colleague, etc. is great. It is almost like a trade apprenticeship - you learn as you go and sooner or later you can handle 95% of the solutions autonomously.

One thing I have seen said time and time again on various blogs and forums is that trying to be highly skilled in a wide range of languages is an almost impossible challenge - it is better to pick one (or maybe two) and then practice, practice, practice to develop it's associated skillset to a great degree.

Answer 3

Perhaps you should start working on REAL WORLD projects for either friends or family.

This will give you positive feedback for your efforts and a sense of "acheivement" when the job is finished.

Great programming theory is all very good, but without introducing some kind of "reward cycle" I can understand how frustrated you could become.

Answer 4

Passion is not something that will die out that easily. There are tons of local user groups/developer groups that you can join to learn from them (most of them are free) To get to some of what you defined as intermediate problem, getting a job is definitely the best solution. You could work on Dave Thomas's coding kata. For difficult ones, you can do some facebook puzzles (they get real hard at the second level and up, easily take hours to days to solve)

Answer 5

You need to start and finish a project that's a large enough to force you to learn different things, but small enough to actually finish. Here are some ideas:

• Jabber client
• RSS reader
• Twitter client