Learning About Computer Programming

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name's Dave Casuto and I am the director of San Francisco Computer Tutors here is San Francisco California. We're going to talk about how to learn about computer programming, what resources are available to you and what ways you can best learn it. First of all you should ask yourself what is your motivation for learning computer programming? Why do you want to do it? Why; how are you going to use it? Are you going to apply it to a new career? Are you going to apply it your own career? So how are you going to apply it? At that point ask yourself what, what resources are available to you? You can go threw books. You can get used books from the Library. You can get new books. You can see what the latest technologies are out there. You can go onto the Internet, like you're doing right now and doing some research on it and see what's available out there. There are CD's, there are other people. There's lots and lots of things. There's networking groups you can join. You can even get a mentor. You can do things like that and then have people actually give you some training on it. So what I would suggest also is working with something that's familiar to you like Microsoft Word for example. You get into Microsoft Word there's something called visual basic. Visual basic I think you can find that under your tools menu in both Word and Excel and those are actually programming languages. So you could go in there and then you can learn about coding in a very easy pace in something you already understand. And then once you learn about visual basic and go with something you already understand then you can take; take a bigger step away from those baby-steps and start learning more object oriented coding like C , in some of the pearl scripts and PHP, and some of these other things that are going to be a little bit more high level. Some are going to be for webs, some of them are going to be for operating systems etc. So you're going to find that there's going to be a ton of choices for you but make sure to do it at your own pace, don't overwhelm yourself. And there's also lots of courses out there. You can go to your local community college and there's going to be very inexpensive courses out there. Maybe you'll find some, some free course or find somebody again who would like to mentor you. O.k., so go forward and have fun."