7 Common Mistakes That Beginners Should Avoid While Learning to Code

August 26, 2022

If you want to start your career as a programmer or software developer, learning to code is intimidating. To achieve your dream, you may buy a tonne of educational materials. You will find the voyage quite thrilling. There are books, online courses, some free resources, or talks. You feel you have so much learning potential and want to learn as much as you can.

But if after two to three months you understand that your approach isn’t helping you get better as a coder, there are some possible mistakes you are making. It’s an indication that you’re still learning how to code.

In this article, we’ll talk about some frequent blunders that programmers should avoid when they’re still learning to code.

Not Planning Before Coding

After analyzing a problem, it can be tempting to jump in and begin creating the code. However, if you had planned the program out in advance, you could have prevented logic mistakes and hours of rewriting the code by doing this.

Planning on paper before you really begin coding will help you examine the scenarios you might have ignored and help you prevent logic errors that happen from diving directly into the first answer you come across, whether it is a simple coding challenge or a complex project.

Syntax Mistake:

Syntax errors are similar to fundamental typos, spelling mistakes, and grammatical errors. It is the location where the code was entered wrongly. Without perfect grammar, punctuation, and spelling, humans can (and do) communicate. We can determine what the other person intended to say and ignore these pesky little errors.

Most of the time, computers cannot ignore mistakes the way we do. They are unable to discern what should or shouldn’t be present. Thus, syntactic mistakes cause them trouble. Syntax code errors might include missing semicolons, excessive brackets, misspelled instructions, and incorrect capitalization.

Logical Mistake:

A logical mistake is the most challenging sort of code problem to find and correct. There are no crashes or useful highlights to show the issue when there are logical issues. Instead, the program functions as intended. However, it doesn’t fulfill your expectations.

Programs that include a logic error don’t operate as intended since you coded them to perform the incorrect action. Because of this, logical mistakes provide the impression that everything is operating as intended. It is an executable program that is written in a functional language. Accordingly, a logic error will be obvious based on the way the program behaves and the results it produces.

Absence of Clean Code:

When you initially start writing code, the main goal is to get it to run and produce the desired result. However, in addition to producing code that functions well, you also need to make sure it is high-quality code.

This encompasses anything from appropriately formatting your code to using relevant variable names and occasionally adding comments to ensure that the code still makes sense when you go back to it.

Additionally, you would have to participate in a team project in the future that requires you to examine and fix the code of others. Consider how challenging it would be to attempt to comprehend another person’s reasoning while interacting with a clumsily written code.

Coding in Isolation:

Due to various factors, many newcomers choose not to engage with the programming communities or other developers. This is one of the most common and serious errors that programmers make. It’s usually a good idea to engage with the programming community while learning to code so that you may benefit from one another.

Github, Stackoverflow, and other online platforms enable users to learn the finest coding practices from the top programmers worldwide, in addition to helping them find solutions to code-related difficulties. You can also rent an Indian developer who will help you with your coding difficulties.

Pretending to be adept at everything:

The realm of programming is endless. Nobody has all the knowledge. Throughout your life, learning never stops. Even the greatest programmers continue to grow every day. There is a new development in technology every two days at this point. Languages change, receive upgrades, a new framework is released, and new languages are introduced to the world.

There is technically no end to this. Therefore, while learning to code, just because you have a firm grasp of a language doesn’t mean you are an expert in it. There is always more to it. Never assume that you know everything and continue growing throughout your life.

Not Spending Enough Time Studying the Basics:

Finding an effective sequence of steps to address a particular problem is essentially the goal of programming. We can call this series of events an algorithm. Essentially, learning to program is the process of learning how to decompose a problem into a series of phases. Take your time while solving issues; don’t even consider creating code until you understand the possible solutions.

You should consider putting your algorithms into code once you feel confident coding them. Use pseudo-code as frequently as you can at this stage because, once you learn it, you can write code in any programming language you choose.

Conclusion:

The present software-driven digital market offers huge opportunities to software programmers and this is the attraction for you to be an expert coder. If you start noticing the above-mentioned points during the initial phase, this will help you to be an excellent coder quickly.

Hope you will avoid these simple yet critical mistakes in your coding journey.

Guest post by Harikrishna Kundariya