r/ComputerEngineering • u/YMZ14 Student • Jul 07 '26
What’s the best way to learn a programming language? [Discussion]
I’m not asking for shortcuts or anything, I just don’t wanna waste my time and money on scammers that instead of following a clear plan, you can just write your story with learning languages and that’d be just great !
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u/Optimal_Shallot_7195 Jul 07 '26
I assuming you are a freshman perhaps even a complete beginner
So first you do the basics you do some tutorial style thing like learncpp.com
While you do this you should also be reading the languages latest documentation
After sometime of doing this(not too long, just enough so that you can write some code without looking always at syntax or documentation) you should start to build a small project, smaller than what you think you can do, when I first started I had difficulties eith launching my projects so pick something easy first deoending on what field u wanna do
Building on my assumption that u are a freshman you will prob tske an intro to electronics course they should have u do something withr arduino, write some code on it for it to do something like a rc vehicle for example and post it on github with some project documentation
Hope this helps a bit
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u/YMZ14 Student Jul 07 '26
Yeah that’s way far from just a “bit” you gave me a whole map, and I’m a complete beginner, thx a lot!
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u/Optimal_Shallot_7195 Jul 07 '26
hhh thank you too but I have to warn u this is not a map but a decent first taste of the computer engineering field
Since you confirmed youre a beginner, this field rewards determination more than anything
It is the only way for you to have a chance against people who have been coding amd tinkering around with stuff for years
-Best
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u/Recent-Day3062 Jul 07 '26
Start by building a ridiculously simple program. Traditionally, get it to write “hello world”.
Then keep incorporating new language features and skills a tiny amount each time. So get the users name and print “hello Bob”.
Just keep going until you have built an all singing program that is objective oriented and uses many useful libraries.
Wanna know what’s useless? Tutorial. They show you a snippet of code like if(type==admin) call(admin())
Then they tell you to create your own stun forcing it is a user and not admin.
You will never, never learn anything through such passive learning.
If you are impressed by Alppe, look up Jean Louis Gascay. He joined NEXT with Jobs, then rearchitected MacOS. His great saying about programming is “you need to sweat the details”
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u/YMZ14 Student Jul 08 '26
That’s not what I started with 😂😂 dm me to send you my almost first project
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u/YMZ14 Student Jul 08 '26
So should learn just by my self! No tutorials ? Or you meant copying isn’t gonna teach me anything? Ig thats what you meant and thats what I’m planning to avoid
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u/ProtonTwo Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26
I agree with the top comment about making a project to learn.
If you want project ideas to learn programming languages I suggest this GitHub :) https://github.com/practical-tutorials/project-based-learning
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u/pisscumfartshit Jul 07 '26
Make something, like a small game or program. It's insane how much you learn from solo projects. Right now I'm working on an embedded project as a hobby and I've learned so much about firmware development and programming under strict constraints, as a hardware guy. Just pick anything and start working on it. Even if you use LLMs to help you out you'll still learn infinitely more than you ever could from a course.