The hard thing about learning to program is that to create anything even vaguely useful you have to learn a million things in parallel.
Say you wanted to build the simplest of Rails apps - you're simultaneously learning not only what the terminal and a text editor is, but how unix commands work, what an MVC framework is, probably a little of HTML and CSS, database migrations (maybe some SQL), asset management/pipeline, some random Rails-specific syntax, probably git, and if the creator of the tutorial is feeling ambitious he/she may throw in some TDD and testing frameworks. And that doesn't even begin to go into Ruby -- the entire programming aspect of programming.
So you're thrown out into the middle of the ocean, and blindly writing code you don't understand (because there's no way any tutorial could fully explain everything you're learning without being 2,000 pages long). You follow the tutorial, you get your little app running, then you realize, "I have no fucking idea what I just did." There's no way on earth you could do it again.
The other approach is to bring you from the bottom up, starting with language/syntax Codecademy style. So you spend a month learning how to almost be able to write a for loop in JavaScript, and then you realize you have no idea why you would ever need to know what a for loop is, and even less of an idea of why it's useful.
I got stuck bouncing back and forth between the two for years (literally), wondering how the other programmers were possibly smart enough that they could grasp meaning from random blobs of tutorial code, or how they possibly had the patience to grind through enough JavaScript tutorials enough that they could actually create something. I finally decided to throw away the crutches and venture out on my own. I think that was the single biggest step in becoming a (decent) programmer.
The timid, "I don't know how to program" side of me said, "Wait, I have no idea how to do this yet. You need to read up on it." But I finally bit the bullet and said, "You know what, I'm building this app right now. No, I don't know how to do a lot of it, yes, my friends that are a lot smarter would probably mock my code if they saw it, but I don't care. I'm building this." I don't think you can ever truly learn to program without saying, "I don't care, I'm building this." It took a long time and more Stack Overflow than anyone should ever care to read, but things finally started clicking. I built a few apps (Rails and iOS), went back to the tutorials, and said, "Are you kidding me? That's what they were trying to teach me?"
There was no way I would have remembered that crap if there was someone guiding me through or holding my hand. Sometimes you just have to start, having no idea what you're doing, and figure it out as you go. That's a foreign concept to people who aren't used to creating things, but I'm convinced it's the only way to truly learn.
My first real, non-toy app was an Android card game. I knew the basics of Java going into it, but nothing else. Following tutorials got me to where I had an app that I could install and run on my device.
At that point, it was up to me to figure out what to do. I started with a single screen that showed some text and added a few more screens that had the same text. Then I added a button that triggered a change of that text. Then a button that displayed an image. And so on until I had a real card game that could even identify whether there were any legal moves available and if the player was stuck.
Every step along the way was not easy and I got derailed a couple times, nearly giving up. The hardest single feature to implement was dragging and dropping a card. It took a lot of cribbed code from a few useful blog posts, but the feeling when I actually got it working was indescribable. It was a Saturday morning and I was running around my house, dragging and dropping cards on my tablet like I was 8 years old and it was the greatest Christmas gift ever. That was the moment when I realized I could actually finish this if I was willing to put in the effort. The rest of that weekend was spent in blissful coding and my commitment to becoming a developer has never wavered since.
Now in my job, which I got an interview for because of the card game, I have witnessed other people with less self-guided (contrasted with CS class projects) experience than I started out with be unable to persist long enough or self-teach hard enough to solve a problem by themselves without asking for help to get over minor bumps. I won't ask for help from a more senior dev unless I have exhausted my abilities to understand the problem space and can enumerate the things I have tried. I refuse to be the person who simply "doesn't know how".
> So you spend a month learning how to almost be able to write a for loop in JavaScript, and then you realize you have no idea why you would ever need to know what a for loop is, and even less of an idea of why it's useful.
This is a carbon copy of my life as a programmer right now.
I've made the decision to just fucking do it about 50 times, but each time I get barely started and get so frustrated with myself for not understanding and not knowing what to look for that I give up. I know that's another point where I just have to sit, searching, until I find the answer, but it seems that from my profound lack of understanding of the basics of the language (JavaScript; despite doing the Codecademy course, and the CodeSchool Node.js and Express.js courses) that I will have to do that for every minute step that I take in the program. It just seems so overwhelming that I become paralyzed in my desire to push on, but feeling that I know I won't make any progress.
>I don't think you can ever truly learn to program without saying, "I don't care, I'm building this."
This is a great point because it's easy to get stuck in analysis paralysis. There's always a tension between needing to stretch out and build something just beyond your capabilities and then having to backfill some of the fundamental knowledge you missed along the way so next time you can reach further.
Say you wanted to build the simplest of Rails apps - you're simultaneously learning not only what the terminal and a text editor is, but how unix commands work, what an MVC framework is, probably a little of HTML and CSS, database migrations (maybe some SQL), asset management/pipeline, some random Rails-specific syntax, probably git, and if the creator of the tutorial is feeling ambitious he/she may throw in some TDD and testing frameworks. And that doesn't even begin to go into Ruby -- the entire programming aspect of programming.
So you're thrown out into the middle of the ocean, and blindly writing code you don't understand (because there's no way any tutorial could fully explain everything you're learning without being 2,000 pages long). You follow the tutorial, you get your little app running, then you realize, "I have no fucking idea what I just did." There's no way on earth you could do it again.
The other approach is to bring you from the bottom up, starting with language/syntax Codecademy style. So you spend a month learning how to almost be able to write a for loop in JavaScript, and then you realize you have no idea why you would ever need to know what a for loop is, and even less of an idea of why it's useful.
I got stuck bouncing back and forth between the two for years (literally), wondering how the other programmers were possibly smart enough that they could grasp meaning from random blobs of tutorial code, or how they possibly had the patience to grind through enough JavaScript tutorials enough that they could actually create something. I finally decided to throw away the crutches and venture out on my own. I think that was the single biggest step in becoming a (decent) programmer.
The timid, "I don't know how to program" side of me said, "Wait, I have no idea how to do this yet. You need to read up on it." But I finally bit the bullet and said, "You know what, I'm building this app right now. No, I don't know how to do a lot of it, yes, my friends that are a lot smarter would probably mock my code if they saw it, but I don't care. I'm building this." I don't think you can ever truly learn to program without saying, "I don't care, I'm building this." It took a long time and more Stack Overflow than anyone should ever care to read, but things finally started clicking. I built a few apps (Rails and iOS), went back to the tutorials, and said, "Are you kidding me? That's what they were trying to teach me?"
There was no way I would have remembered that crap if there was someone guiding me through or holding my hand. Sometimes you just have to start, having no idea what you're doing, and figure it out as you go. That's a foreign concept to people who aren't used to creating things, but I'm convinced it's the only way to truly learn.