The Student

When my daughter started her computer science studies at university, I realized that there were a lot of gaps between what she knew as a first-year student and what the university assumed she knew. Students were thrown into the deep end and expected to swim. Many just drowned.

This series, The Becoming a Programmer Series, aims to fix that by giving the student a solid understanding of all areas of programming by focusing on the things you must be familiar with to make it in the real world. I think you will use more of what I teach you in this series than what you may use from what you learned from university. That said, it is great if you have the opportunity to attend a university. That said, many top programmers, are self-taught.

My intended audience with this series is anyone who wants to become a programmer by following a well-designed method from scratch.

My intended audience is anyone who is enrolled in a computer science or information systems degree and needs a preparation course that will separate them from the rest.

My intended audience is anyone who has been programming for a while but does not necessarily understand why or how things work. I call them copy-and-paste programmers. These days, with AI being a hot topic, I think we will have more of those programmers. They will have some AI app spitting out some code and have no clue why the code does what it does. Call me old school, but I prefer RI (Real Intelligence) over AI. For example, you use Dependency Injection (DI for short) in your application but may not know what DI is or why it is a good (or bad) idea to use. The same goes for things like Connection Pooling, Caching, and Object Relational Mapping to name a few.

There are excellent courses online that cover programming languages, frameworks, databases, and even complete technology stacks in depth. The problem though is that you may spend many hours learning things you may never use or may not be relevant at your current skill level.

I think this series serves as the perfect entry point into those in-depth courses as it provides you with only enough you need to know at any specific point in your progress, thus easing you into new territory more gently and preventing information overload. Once you are done with this series, you will gain a lot more from those comprehensive courses.

Remember, we sit, then crawl, then walk, then run, and then sprint. In that order!