Considering picking up some programming skills? Great idea!
Programming is a popular and rewarding career path, especially when you get the fundamentals right. Whether you’re considering picking it up as a hobby, or you’re eyeing up a potential job, it pays to understand the basics. Find out a bit more about what programming involves, and whether it might be for you.
Programming Fundamentals for Beginners
Your computer’s operating system, your phone, this website: they have one thing in common. They all run on a set of instructions to perform their complex tasks.
Those instructions are computer code and, when put together, they become a computer program. There isn’t really a difference between the terms "programming" and "coding"; they both refer to the creation of computer programs.
The Basics of Coding: What Types Are There?
All programmers do the same basic thing. They write programs that carry out some kind of desired behavior. You can write code in different programming languages, which are often used for completely different things.
This means there are different ways to use your programming skills. Here are the most common programming career paths to consider:
Software Developer
Software developers—sometimes software engineers—create computer programs to solve problems. Such problems might range from how to collect simple data to how to manage the programs that the computer itself runs.
Software developers also create really useful programs to enable things like machine learning, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and so on.
A software developer role is possibly the most general in programming. Most programmers could fit the role of software developer, although many roles are more specialized.
Web Developer
Web development is a field within programming where you develop programs that users access online. Basically, this means you’ll be making websites or web applications.
Within web development, there are two broad subdivisions: frontend and backend development.
Frontend developers create the structure, design, and other visual elements of a program or website. They work on user interfaces, enabling users to interact seamlessly with a program. The major coding languages you'll need to learn to be a successful frontend developer are HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Backend developers, on the other hand, write code to create the behavior that powers the engine room. It is backend development that creates most of the functions of complex websites like Facebook, for example. If you're interested in learning how to become a backend developer, check out any of the main languages: PHP, JavaScript, Java, Python, and Ruby.
Data Science
Data scientists use programming languages and tools to collect, store, and interpret vast amounts of data.
Some people don’t consider data science to fall within the field of programming. But data science is essential for programming fields like machine learning.
If you're looking to get into this field, Python is very commonly used in data science so that's a good language to get started with. Some other languages also frequently used in data science include R, SQL, C, C++, Java, and so on.
Systems Programmer
A systems programmer writes programs for computers to run rather than applications for end-users. They often create scripts and utilities that may run on your computer without you even knowing about them. They can also write low-level code, that computers rely upon to run, including the operating system itself.
Systems programmers use low-level languages, optimized for performance, like C and C++. They might even write in assembly, a complex language that few programmers will ever master.
