Learning to code, starting somewhere

I am not completely new to coding.

More than 10 years ago, I started with HTML and soon got to love it, built my first website, showed it to friends. I even built some nice websites with further HTML and CSS.

Years later, I actually became curious about the things beyond static websites and got interested in PHP. Soon though, I was intimtidated by the code I read in the books. And I did not feel like typing two pages of example code into my text editor in order to see it did not work. I did not understand more than that you had to perform striptags in order avoid malicious code from entering your system through forms.

But would I be able to do that myself? I mean, writing code myself that would make e-mails arrive at their detination or engage people in fun quizzes? I doubted it.

Some time later, I tried it with a true university class in imperative programming with Pascal. I spent a lot of time reading though a large script, trying to solve assignments revolving around data structures like binary trees. I had a headache. I did not learn. I did not write code. It was no fun at all. Allright, learning is not always fun, but some motivation has to be there.

So what did I lack?

- Practice, for one thing: I need to write code, starting and practising with simple examples. I need to feel encouraged to write code

- A perspective, for another: I want to have something to look forward to. I want to learn something that will allow me to create small but considerable results. Creating an interactive website, an animated form or even a small game? Yeah, why not.


This is why I started with Javascript and why I started to learn it online. At the end of May 2015, I signed up at FreeCodeCamp and I am happy I did it. While I got though the HTML, CSS and Bootstrap parts rather quickly through previous experience, I am struggling quite a bit with the programming exercises. But the steps are realistic. And the perspective looks promising. I am getting really comfortable with the Javascript syntax and looking forward to the challenges to come.