Learning from scratch

Good evening. I’m just starting to learn programming, and i found this site. I don’t know much, and I thought learning by seeing my progress via games would be helpful. Am I too much of a noob to use this site to learn? Should I go read some books then come back?

Welcome to Codingame! It’s a great place to build your skills if you already know a little bit, but it’s not really for learning from scratch. The first puzzle is simple, though. To start off, try the Onboarding puzzle (Puzzles menu, first item). It’s pretty basic and should give you a small taste of what the other puzzles contain. If you struggle with it, then you probably should go hit the books and come back. Otherwise, the puzzles have a progression from easy to very (very!) hard and you can go at whatever pace and in whichever language works for you.

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I completed the first challenge. I went on to the 2nd challenge and was completely lost. (thank you for the welcome by the way!)

I’m the type of person who learns best by doing and I thought by working with this site and the games I would learn quickly because I would see the progress or fails instantly, but I feel I’m either not smart enough, or need more preliminary knowledge before I continue here.

Hey, you are definitely smart enough (in my opinion everyone is) :slight_smile: further more I completely understand your learning method, I am exactly the same way. What I do is if I get stuck on a specific problem on this site I go look at the puzzle on the puzzles page again. Under the title it gives a small description in grey. If you are unsure how to solve the problem you should research that topic until you understand it and then come back :smiley: (for example: :puzzle: - :description: -> The Descent - Searching in a list)

ok so for example; in The Descent. The goal is searching in a list. I see the code on the right of the screen and become confused because I don’t know what I’m looking for.

I have some basic knowledge of coding, with javascript mainly, and a very very little bit of C#. I understand the difference between float and int, etc. but I feel overwhelmed I guess I can say. Does this make sense or am I out of my mind?

One thing that tripped me up in the beginning was the apparent lack of problem descriptions. I was quite pleased to find out (on my third puzzle!) that if you scroll down in the panel that has the animations, you’ll find a very nice description of what you’re supposed to do. It works the same for all the puzzles. Maybe you have the same problem I did?

Also, when you get stuck, there’s almost always someone in chat who will help you out.

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Haha no, no :slight_smile: This makes perfect sense. I promise you can find a piece of code that will confuse every single person on this site. However, if the starting code does confuse you then you may need to know a bit more before you will be able to tackle anymore challenges on this site. What I would recommend is googling any part that confuses you. If you see “for (var i = 0; i < 8; i++)” and don’t know what that means then throw it into google, hit enter and see what happens :slight_smile: But for now if you follow this link you should learn enough to get you started on this site (Code Academy - Learn Javascript). It’s great for beginners and for anyone who wants to brush up there skills a bit :smiley:

I’m learning javascript via codecombat, but I really want to learn c# for making my own games. How do the two languages work together?

More or less the same as a chicken and an octopus. They’re both living beings but that’s about as far as it gets.

JS and C# are just two different, unrelated programming languages. There will be common points but not significantly more between those two than between any two other languages.

I have no Idea, I don’t know C# but I would recommend learning all the programming concepts in javascript first as it is (well was for me) an easier language to pick up and understand. Is there a particular reason you want to make games in C#? You can make games in any language so I am just curious :slight_smile:

I have a friend that is very good at programming and told me that C# would be the best one for me to learn. So I started watching videos on it, and picked up a book and messed a little bit with it in Unity. I like the language, I was just hoping by doing on a site like this I would learn faster than reading. That’s all.

I see, a good a reason as any :slight_smile: Yea, this site is more for practicing your new found programming concepts, not developing or learning the concepts. So once you know some more you should definitely come back and practice on the problems here :smiley:

He is not totally wrong. I touched a few but really started “learning” with C# - I find it very approachables for “newcomers”. On one hand it takes some tasks away from you such as memory management and is pretty intuituve, on the other hand it “forces” you to declare your variables types, have a syntak less permissive than other languages (Python, I look at you). So good start :wink: [quote=“lifeindecibel, post:11, topic:1767”]
I was just hoping by doing on a site like this I would learn faster than reading.
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I am not sure one such class exists (for programming languages that would only make sense as an “open classroom”, with a teacher (could be prerecorded) and some exercises.

When I learned C# with an online “tutorial” (was more 600 pages pdf) it was made in a way with a lot of exercises and examples to make the theory clear. This is maybe this format you would need: 1 page of theory, one example associated to copy/paste, a challenge to try recreating and a solution to this challenge. Repeat for each concept the “book” contains.

Good Luck :wink:

You might want to take a look at:

https://dotnetcademy.net/

I haven’t gone too far through it, but what I saw looks pretty decent.

  • danBhentschel
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It looks pretty cool. I might want to have a look too.

Thanks

Thank you for the link. I will definitely check it out!