How can one become a good programmer?

Answer 1

Computer programming is usually a two year program that can be taken at most universities.

If you want to be taken seriously, you'll need to attend a 4 year accredited college Computer Science program. If you REALLY want to go places, go the 2 or 3 extra years to get a masters degree.

You can learn programming by doing it - a degree may or may not help, but actual samples of your coding often will do more for you to get a job as a programmer than a degree. You can also look for internships to show your skill or even volunteer for small nonprofits.

You will almost always need a 4 year degree especially if you want to work for companies making AAA games. Once in awhile, I see a very talented young programmer who has maybe 3 years of college finished and through internships is picked up by a company without a degree. This is not the usual route though. GET A DEGREE!

Answer 2

If you want to be taken seriously, you'll need to attend a 4 year accredited college Computer Science program. If you REALLY want to go places, go the 2 or 3 extra years to get a masters degree.

However, that said, anyone who produces computer code is a computer programmer. You don't have to have a college degree to program. You can easily produce shareware, self-published commercial software, and code for open source projects without any degrees so long as you actually know how to write code.

If you just want to informally learn to code, just get you a programming language, study the manual, get other books of that same language, look at the examples, modify the examples, then try to write your own code. If it doesn't work, then study the manuals and code examples again and attempt to debug what you've written. If all else fails, get a mentor or a knowledgeable friend.

Answer 3

The minimum educational requirements are a certificate from a two year college specializing in computer training. Most employers are looking for a bachelor's degree or more.

Strong skills in mathematics, logic, and attention to detail are essential for this career course.

Answer 4

Practice! Choose a programming language (there are many), buy a good manual or two and find a tutorial on the web. Then practice, practice, practice Choice of programming language is a personal thing. They range from quite easy to understand, to very difficult. As a starter, I would recommend something like Perl, Python or Ruby since these are freely available, easy to get your first program running but very powerful if you need it. Also they have a large web community of fans who are very helpful. Just my opinion though - other excellent languages are available and other programmers will no doubt give you other recommendations! More input To a certain extent, programmers are born and not made - a natural aptitude is useful. Many programmers are graduates; not necessarily in computer science, but often in engineering or science subjects and find that they take to the computer science elements of the courses. So a good start is to attend university or college. To become a good programmer takes practice. I often say that the key to programming are the three 'P's: Persistance

Patience

Profanity(!) Persistance is essential because good programs are made by rewriting and rewriting again. Most top programmers make the point that it isn't writing the program, but rewriting it that makes it. Patience is also essential, many times you will have to "fight against the machine"; trying to understand poorly written or incomplete technical manuals. Profanity is there because you have to have a sense of humour - in particular a sense of irony. Also, it means to avoid becoming "religious" about operating systems, languages or particular computers. Over the years I have met programmers who tried to convince me to everything was worthless apart from the BBC micro, the Sinclair Spectrum, the Amiga and Xenix (amongst many others). History tells us that these have all largely disappeared so, before you leap into the various windows/mac os/linux battle, remember that computing is very transient in nature. Finally, remember that the last 10% of a programming project takes 90% of the time; the difference between a program that essentially works and one that is suitable for releasing to users is a huge gulf, that many programmers fail to leap.

Answer 5

To get started in computer programming you can purchase a tutorial book on programming and take a college course in order to obtain a degree. Choose a language to start with and as you master that, you can move on to more languages and more complex ones such as Java.

Answer 6

By programming computers.

That might seem like an oversimplified answer, but it's basically how you do it. The more you program, the closer you'll find yourself being more and more professional if that's what you care about.