The best programming course if you want to be a programmer
The more I studied programming, I realized algorithms are really important. I think C language is never easy, but an essential part of programming. Many programs of computer science in college have adopted the C language in the first semester. I searched a lot of courses for C language and algorithm, I found ‘Introductory C Programming’ course on Coursera. If you find a C language programming course or a basic algorithm course, it would be the best choice.
There are good courses in the world
I really tried to find a good course even if it was paid. I have already taken the CS50 course from Harvard, which is a well known and nice one but it isn’t sufficient for actual programming skills and deep thinking for me.
Coursera and Udacity are not free and others are free courses. Coursera is $49/month. (but you can take lots of other Coursera courses. it’s like a Netflix monthly subscription.)
Why Coursera?
Most courses are doing with Python because of the entry barrier. It was difficult to find any C programming courses. If you want to learn basic algorithms, this course would be helpful.
What did you learn from the course?
I realized that writing the code is actually a much later step in the programming process. We should think about seven steps of the programming process.
Step 1 ~ 4: Devise algorithm, Step 5: Translate to Code, Step 6: Test Program, Step 7: Debug Program.
Your brain could find some patterns of problems and you can just write down the pattern you thought. After that, translate to code. I’m not smart enough to translate all the algorithms to code. But I can find patterns even if it takes some time.
I learned that “Everything is a number”. It’s an important approach to programming because everything is a number and everything is a type. Hardware only knows 0 and 1. We use programming languages to communicate with computers because they are fool machines that only understand 0 and 1. This is quite helpful when I studied programming.