5 important things to remember while learning new Programming language

Learning something new is always fun and energetic. My name is Malathi Boggavarapu and i read a lot of articles on daily basis. I am a frequent blogger, had great enthusiasm towards learning new things, Travelling and Photography.  I am a Software Engineer by Profession.

While going through some of the articles, i came across a saying

"Every human have a natural ability called neuroplasticity which means that if we learn new knowledge and have new experiences, we can develop new networks or circuits of neurons and literally change our mind." 

That's the power of learning new things. Because whenever you are learning something new, unconsciously you feel new experiences in your mind and hence develop new neurons which can change your mind.

Now let's jump start to our actual topic about remembering 5 important things when we start to learn new programming language.

Programmers always try to learn new technology when it is being demanded at work or to just add to their profile. Application architects always try to keep themselves updated about the current technology trends that were being released and used in the software industry inorder to efficiently support their daily work as a Software architect. And it becomes the same purpose when we talk about Infrastructure architects too. But this post is particularly written for Software Programmers or Software Engineers. What we should actually remember when we start learning about new programming language?

Do not jump into learning the Semantics and Syntax directly

As the title says, most of the programmers will directly go through the semantics and syntax of the language and try to implement them but instead start with the background of the language such as who has invented it and what's the main purpose of it's invention. That is how you get a bigger perspective of how Software industries work and on what basis the new technologies would emerge. Going forward who knows what?!! You could also be one of the Software engineers who do the research and develop a new programming language!!

Don't dig deep into one thing

Many programmers does it! When they freshly start learning with great enthusiasm they obviously feel to master the language and finally end up going deep into the details of one particular concept for longer time. As a result you will get easily tired and get bored about it. Getting such boredom feeling at the start is not so good because there is still long way to go. 

Instead start learning the basics of the language and put them into the practise in parallel.

Develop an application

This is one of the crucial step to be taken inorder to learn more about a language. The more you put into practise, the more you learn. Take few usecases and try to implement them. You will also understand which concepts you need to learn in depth inorder to solve your usecase. There you go!! As opposed to the above point, now you got a chance to learn in depth about a particular concept. 

Resolve few issues from StackOverflow

It is one of the greatest way to enhance your skills. Signup to Stackoverflow and start searching for the questions that were being posted out there about the language. You can always check the solutions for the questions you don't understand. Most importantly try to solve the problems that were posted out there. 

Contribute to the GitHub projects

Once you gain medium level of knowledge, go and search in GitHub for projects that were implemented using the language. Download and go through them. You will always learn great number of details from the existing projects because that is how you gain more practical knowledge about particular programming language. 

So this is the end of the post. Hope this is helpful. Please post your comments below.