What to learn?

[Mr. Cucumber]

Suppose a human being...who has never programmed but has used a computer for various tasks and he is very good at using the computer...and occasionally fixing it ... but he has never programming ever in life... So he is recently interested into 3 things

1. Machine learning and AI

2. Web Development 

3. Penetration testing

So what should he do first and how should he continue his journey?

[iLostMyXbox21]

i say C# or C++... or just C

[Streetguru]

17 minutes ago, Mr. Cucumber said:

 

Python in general

HTML for web stuff

[mail929]

1. Python

2. HTML, CSS, & Javascript

3. Most modern languages see here

 

[vorticalbox]

1 hour ago, Mr. Cucumber said:

Suppose a human being...who has never programmed but has used a computer for various tasks and he is very good at using the computer...and occasionally fixing it ... but he has never programming ever in life... So he is recently interested into 3 things

1. Machine learning and AI

2. Web Development 

3. Penetration testing

So what should he do first and how should he continue his journey?

I recommend you pick one and focus on it. all 3 can be done in python, 2 people the back end not front end, so python is probably a good please to start.

remember you need to know how a system works before you can break it.

[myselfolli]

I'd agree with @mail929, start with Python and also look into HTML, CSS, JavaScript (jQuery) and maybe PHP.

 

I started with HTML and CSS. I think it's a good place to start, since you can see the resultst of what you're doing really quickly.

[Klemmbrett]

Whats mentioned before is already pretty good to start with. You should also look into Databases, and how they work and how to communicate with them. Also it does not hurt if you have some Linux skills as most software will be deployed and run on Linux environments. 

[myselfolli]

19 hours ago, Klemmbrett said:

Whats mentioned before is already pretty good to start with. You should also look into Databases, and how they work and how to communicate with them. Also it does not hurt if you have some Linux skills as most software will be deployed and run on Linux environments. 

Well yes and no. I agree, knowing your way around a database is always helpful and some linux bash skills don't hurt either. But not most software is deployed on Linux necessarily

[voiha]

I'll just copy paste my answer from another thread, if it's long, lemme know I'll edit it.


 

Disclaimer HTML is not a programming language, and take everything I say with some grain of salt I'm no expert in any shape or form !

--------------

 

For editors pick either Sublime or even better (as of now) Visual Studio Code both are free.

Everything depends on what you want to do with your knowledge. You said you want to do apps and icon packs. I guess starting with the good old HTML/CSS and from there Javascript will be best for you, as you will be able to further use framework to push them as apps for the phone, so you won't have to learn Java. 

 

Good reads can be found below (watch them in this order if you're total beginner or you can try doing some html/css codecademy course to see if you would even like coding" you can find it here. )

~
The Fundamentals in video format:
Teaches you Computer science fundamentals from a great teacher

Teaches you valuable stuff that you would wish you had know before starting - no joke

You did a bit of C# so I guess you can use that too (not needed)

~

Now the boring part (reading):
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/comments/61oly8/new_read_me_first/

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnprogramming/wiki/online

 

https://www.thinkful.com/blog/why-learning-to-code-is-so-damn-hard/

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/wiki/faq

 

~~~

YouTube channels like The coding train are great place to start too. Reply if you want something more specific or you have some questions!

With time and practice you will understand that most of the time you will find yourself reading about the problem and you will systematically find new resource to read and my links would be no longer enough/right for you. So don't worry if you bring yourself to a wall and you don't know how to overcome it, just start with the basics again and you will find yourself on the right track right away.
Cheers!

 

---

Edit I would try adding more stuff whenever I remember to

You can upload your website online for free via Github Pages (It's not complicated)

-
You can build .APK/.Exe/iOS apps without even having to do anything via adobe phonegap. (again not complicated) - there is better frameworks but for a beginner this is a great start as you won't really seek performance or you won't really actually know how to optimize your app.

Look at Jasonette it's good framework!!

-

Google is your friend, but don't wait for someone to answer you in stackoverflow try understanding on your own.
-
Ask programmers for some additional help if you need (you would be surprised how a single word that you don't know what means and search it on google can boost your knowledge).
-

[Guest]

In my personal professional experience, knowing HTML & JavaScript has done the most for me. PHP was also a good skill but easily picked up if you know HTML & JavaScript. 

 

Javascript CAN be used to create standalone applications (node?) 

html is a formatting language that can create UI. 2 job offers required it, my other job will need it when they start their website. 

Javascript can be written in HTML & teaches functional programming. 

PHP let’s you interact with databases & run code on the server. 

 

Whatever you learn will not be wasted however. You can spend your whole life only knowing python, or C, or C#. If you want to go web developer, HTML is a great start, JavaScript is good, PHP is good. CSS is like “I want this text to be this color in this font.” CSS supplements HTML & is useful. 

 

I’d say try out some classes on codecademy for free. They have python, html, java, JavaScript (there is a difference) & more. 

 

If you like web development, HTML, CSS & JavaScript are the way to go. I’d advise taking a college class or 2 on it at your local community or online at a lab accredited college. If you want a degree, you’ll already have credits towards it. 

 

As for machine learning, I don’t know much about it but you might need a degree to learn enough. I’d ask some professors or hope a machine learning guy shows up here. 

 

As for haxor... enroll in a degree in IT, networking or Computer science; before you know it, you’ll know how to hack. As @vorticalbox said. You have to know how something works before you break it. Well, you live in your house right? You know the best place to break in. Similar enough concept. 

[JohnDongus]

Nodejs. 

[duncannah]

I suggest Javascript (by extension Node.JS). Make sure you're learning the modern syntax (often labelled as ES6 or ES2015)

[wasab]

On 12/10/2018 at 8:21 AM, Mr. Cucumber said:

Suppose a human being...who has never programmed but has used a computer for various tasks and he is very good at using the computer...and occasionally fixing it ... but he has never programming ever in life... So he is recently interested into 3 things

1. Machine learning and AI

2. Web Development 

3. Penetration testing

So what should he do first and how should he continue his journey?

he first need to learn how to code hello world. 

[INSERTNAMEHERE]

On 12/10/2018 at 2:21 PM, Mr. Cucumber said:

Suppose a human being...who has never programmed but has used a computer for various tasks and he is very good at using the computer...and occasionally fixing it ... but he has never programming ever in life... So he is recently interested into 3 things

1. Machine learning and AI

2. Web Development 

3. Penetration testing

So what should he do first and how should he continue his journey?

Those are tasks that usually take a university degree to fully comprehend so do a masters degree in computer science or a data science?

 

If you just want to program and you want to be as badass as it gets in the industry these steps are probably the most healthy ones to take (as of 2018):

Start with C++ it does not have all the bells and whistles other languages have and you need a good bit of understanding to really make full use of the language.

After that blow your mind using Java or C#. C# creates faster programs (usually) and has more features but with Java you'll have better portability across platforms.

Then you should try and do some kind of scripting language like Javascript (Typescript and Coffeescript offer more features) or Python (which is very good for scientific applications like machine learning).

And for the cherry on the icing on the cake do some functional programming with Scala, F# or Go (Go is probably the most popular and good for some cloud programming) and after that you should know erverything there is to know about programming and we should happily never see you again cause you have ascended the plane of average programmers.

 

[vorticalbox]

8 hours ago, myselfolli said:

Well yes and no. I agree, knowing your way around a database is always helpful and some linux bash skills don't hurt either. But not most software is deployed on Linux necessarily

It is if it's deployed to a server, almost all web servers are running linux.

[vorticalbox]

32 minutes ago, INSERTNAMEHERE said:

And for the cherry on the icing on the cake do some functional programming 

I do function programming in JavaScript with ramda.

[INSERTNAMEHERE]

well... ramda isn't really that powerful (we are talking compared to Scala F# or Go) and javascript has too much overhead for system programming its more used for small web apps

[vorticalbox]

7 hours ago, INSERTNAMEHERE said:

well... ramda isn't really that powerful (we are talking compared to Scala F# or Go) and javascript has too much overhead for system programming its more used for small web apps

We have a financial crm handling 100s of concurrent users across multiple companies, we have a hand full of other apps that include template building and running custom reports that can easily handle millions of data points and Web sockets servers.

 

All created in node running in docker on aws.

 

We make use of aws lambdas to off load work and also create smaller services such as a validation service that validates and sanitises every user saved data before being actually saved 

 

I wouldn't say anything we build is a small web app.

 

I personally have create many CLI apps in node that do things from data migration of millions of financial records to smaller things like getting a specific bit of information or even batch renaming files.

 

JavaScript is might powerfull and scalable.

 

[INSERTNAMEHERE]

Since docker itself uses Go to implement its containers my argument still stands. You use an API to interface with docker functionality that doesn't make javascript mighty but rather the use of containers. Thats a great example of why Go is one of the most popular languages for cloud computing because all the magic still happens in code written in Go.

 

Even compared to Python Javascript is rather on the lighter side of things considering scientific data applications which work on datasets in the neighborhood of 10^15 entries. Not even mentioning system programming which just does not really work that well with neither Javascript nor Python. 

[reniat]

4 hours ago, INSERTNAMEHERE said:

 Thats a great example of why Go is one of the most popular languages for cloud computing because all the magic still happens in code written in Go.

this kinda misses the point of abstraction. It doesn't matter what docker is written in, since you access it through a REST service. The REST backend being written in Go doesn't have any bearing on what the application consuming the API should be written in.

[INSERTNAMEHERE]

On 12/12/2018 at 2:57 PM, reniat said:

this kinda misses the point of abstraction. It doesn't matter what docker is written in, since you access it through a REST service. The REST backend being written in Go doesn't have any bearing on what the application consuming the API should be written in.

If you are are only using the API yes obviously but if you want to modify your containers beyond what the API can give you its not uninteresting to be able to write go code especially since you are able to do so because Docker is open source. 
To elaborate further the sentiment of @vorticalbox was that Javascript is powerful because he uses advantages of containers I pointed out that using docker has nothing to do with the sentiment that compiled general purpose languages offer more in depth features as a interpreted scripting language pointing to his own example that the very features he is interfacing with are written in go because of the needed lower level of access to the hardware.

[myselfolli]

On 12/11/2018 at 11:09 PM, vorticalbox said:

It is if it's deployed to a server, almost all web servers are running linux.

Wrong again, in multiple places.

 

Web servers are - if anything - running on Linux. And while I do agree, that this is the best option (and what I do myself as well), it's not neccesarily done everywhere. In my company for example, many internal websites are hosted on Windows Servers and IIS8.

[vorticalbox]

42 minutes ago, myselfolli said:

Wrong again, in multiple places.

 

Web servers are - if anything - running on Linux. And while I do agree, that this is the best option (and what I do myself as well), it's not neccesarily done everywhere. In my company for example, many internal websites are hosted on Windows Servers and IIS8.

you're right its not done everywhere and that is why I said "almost all".