Confident Coding

Master the Fundamentals of Code and Supercharge Your Career

Rob Percival

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780749479640
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming
• Index: Computer Science

If you want to master the fundamentals of coding and kick start your career, Confident Coding is the book for you. Everyone has a digital life, but too few truly understand how the software that dominates the world actually works. Coding is one of the most in demand skills on the job market and grasping the basics can advance your creative potential and make you stand out from the crowd.

Rob Percival gives you a step-by-step learning guide to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, building iPhone apps, building Android apps and debugging. On reading this book and honing your skills through practice, you will be able to code in each of these languages, build your own website, build your own app and have the confidence to supercharge your employability.

Confident Coding provides you with the roadmap you need to enhance your professional life through coding, with insightful and inspirational guidance, including real life success stories, on how to use your new skills. The ability to code can give your CV the edge on the competition, give you greater autonomy and improve your work performance. If you are a self-employed entrepreneur, being able to create your own website or app can grant you valuable freedom and revolutionize your business. If you are an aspiring developer, this book will give you the building blocks to embark on this career path.

Online resources include coding exercises and activities where readers can practise and hone their new skills.

PART ONE

Why coding?

01

Why coding is important and what it can do for you

We’ve already seen several reasons why learning to code is important: it can increase your salary, widen your future career choices and be a springboard into self-employment and entrepreneurship. It will also help you navigate the increasingly automated future of smart assistants, self-driving cars and virtual reality.

In this chapter we will look at some more specific things you can do with coding right now, many of which we will expand on through the course of this book.

Becoming more effcient

Almost all jobs today require a fair bit of time working with a computer. You likely have to do a range of similar tasks each day, including working with email, creating and managing documents, and searching the web. Almost all of these tasks can be made more efficient with a strong knowledge of how the software and operating system you are using works.

Initially, simply using keyboard shortcuts will likely save you several minutes each day, and more importantly will start you thinking about how the software you are using works, and how your workflow could be improved. Services such as text expansion and If This Then That, which we will be covering in detail later on, can save you a huge amount of time, as well as helping you do a better job. Imagine being able to automatically email your colleagues with a summary of the effectiveness of your weekly newsletter. Or completely automating the process of turning your weekly sales report into a live webpage that your colleagues can view any time.

Learning to code will allow you to do all this and much more, doing a better job in less time.

Communicating with technical people

Regardless of your current fluency with technology, it is likely that you need to communicate with technical people fairly regularly about things that you don’t entirely understand. Whether it is trying to get some content added to the company website, getting some software installed on your computer or removing the tweet you accidentally posted on the company account, greater technical knowledge can make every aspect of those conversations much more straightforward.

As well as becoming more familiar with the terminology that technical people use (which really isn’t as complicated or mysterious as it seems), you will know the fundamental nature of how computer systems work and fit together. This means that every time you come across a new system, or piece of software, you will be able to zero in on the key functions and properties, enabling you to get to grips with how it works, and discuss it confidently.

Being secure in your ability to deal with computers and software will dramatically improve both your productivity and your speed with which you can get things done when working with technical staff in your company.

Understanding how software works

One of the primary reasons programming is being taught to young children is because of the speed with which the world of software develops. Our current primary computing device, the smartphone, has only been around in its current form for 10 years. Who knows what devices we will be using 5, 10 or 20 years from now? Teaching children to code teaches them the fundamentals of how software works, which are not likely to change any time soon. This will enable them to quickly adapt to new operating systems, different programs or apps, and new devices.

The same is true for adults – learning how computers work gives you the power to absorb new software and hardware into your workflow, making you more adaptable and essentially future-proofing your career.

Knowing what it takes

Further to understanding how software works, learning to code gives you an awareness of what is involved in building a webform, or adding a feature to an app. It is likely at some point in your career that you will need to work directly with coders to add features to the company website, customize the software you use every day, or even to create a new app from scratch.

If you aren’t aware of what is necessary to build a website, app or individual feature, you are open to either overpaying for what you are getting, or not getting exactly what you wanted. Knowing what it takes to write some code gives you power in negotiations and while managing a project, as well as the ability to get the job done quickly and to budget.

Building your own website or app

Before the internet, if you wanted to share an idea, product or service with the world, there were significant obstacles to overcome. You would have had to publish information in a newspaper or book, or sell directly through shops. The web changed all that, and now you can build a website in a matter of hours which is immediately accessible to the 3 billion people currently online. The only obstacle is learning to code.

To me that is a hugely exciting concept – coding enables you to build the equivalent of a worldwide shopfront with nothing but a laptop and a (free) text editor. No more bricks and mortar required.

We’ll look at several different ways to build your own website and app (and why you might want to) throughout this book.

Building a web presence

Eighty per cent of employers Google job applicants before inviting them for interview. Take a moment to search your own name and see what comes up. Is it what you would want a potential employer to see? Creating a blog, portfolio site, or a simple site for a project you’ve undertaken or ebook you have written enables you to control what your future boss sees, and helps you stand out as an applicant.

A web presence matters and learning to control yours will put you ahead of 95 per cent of the population. We will cover the whys and hows of the creation of blogs and portfolio sites later on in this book.

Starting your own business

‘Technical cofounders’, ie people who want to start a business, and have coding skills, are so highly in demand that whole websites have been dedicated to the task, and the search phrase ‘find a technical cofounder’ has 3.2 million results on Google.

Coding skills enable you to start any business you like, but they also enable you to partner with people and provide the technical expertise that all new companies need. Whether or not you want to start a company today, knowing that the opportunity is always there is incredibly exciting, and we will look at the process in some detail later in this book. What entrepreneurial opportunities could learning to code bring you?

Taking on extra responsibilities within your current role

In many jobs there is not an obvious process for advancement. Or perhaps there is a process but it is a slow one, and you are looking for opportunities to speed up your next promotion. It can be difficult to simply ‘do your job better’, or find other ways to stand out from the crowd.

Learning to code gives you the ability to, for example, build an app that makes something that you and your colleagues do regularly easier or more effective. You could create a webpage that helps people to arrange car sharing, or if you are a lawyer you could build an app to allow clients to instantly view the status of their case, and be automatically alerted to any updates. Or you could simply take responsibility for your area of the company website, making sure it is up to date and perhaps introducing tools and features that become popular with your customers or clients.

Doing things like this might sound extraneous or unnecessary, but they will get you noticed, and can be the beginning of something big. Even if they are not, you will learn a huge amount building your idea, and make lots of mistakes, which, with any luck, you won’t make next time round.

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