Tips To Improve Your Programming Skills

To program, you must elicit ideas from other people and share your ideas with them. Sharing ideas comes in many forms. I have already discussed about the Steps to  be a better programmer. So read on my earlier post on [Nine Steps To Improve Your Programming Skills] and enjoy! Programming can be a lot of fun.

Related Links:
Nine Steps To Improve Your Programming Skills
Six Points To Improve Your Programming Skills

And you cant stop at any point saying that you are a good programmer. You need to keep improving your skills... Here are some tips to follow to improve your programing skills.

• Start small, aim for things that you most likely will be able to achieve, and work your way up.
• Tutorial sites are an excellent resource as well.
• Reading the work of others (source code) is an excellent means of improving ones skills. Better still, work your way through their code by eye, working out the flow and what happens to the variables. Then try to write your own code to do the same thing (or maybe even improve on it). You'll quickly learn why things need to be written a certain way and you'll pick up some useful tips on how to write efficiently.
• Talk to other programmers. People can often be a good resource for information, particularly when starting out. Find out whether there's a group of programmers who meet up locally.
• Have fellow programmers read your code. You would be surprised what they know that you may have never thought of before!
• Don't know any professional programmers? Find an online forum that's dedicated to your chosen programming language / operating system.

• If you go down this route, read and observe the forum etiquette. There are lots of good hearted experts willing to help out... if asked the right way.
• Remember to be polite because you're asking for a favour, don't get frustrated if you don't understand everything at once, and also don't expect them to want to review 10,000 lines of code. Instead ask simple, single-focus questions and post just the relevant 5-10 lines of code that it relates to. That way you're most likely to get a positive response.
• But before you start posting, do a search - your question has almost certainly been encountered and solved already.

• Keep your past work, it is a good point of reference.
• Keep your code visually elegant, not because it's pretty but because it makes it easier to read... essential when you come to make a change in 6 months' time. This means using TAB indentation to differentiate lines of code that are encapsulated (if, for, while, etc...). Read more about code indenting.
• Find an editor that uses colour-coded syntax-highlighting. It really helps to separate comments from keywords from numbers from strings, etc. (Better still, use an IDE. See below.)
• Double check spelling/syntax. A slight mistake can cause a lot of stress.
• Use a debugger tool. Instead of placing statements in your code to output variable values or "Got here", a debugger tool will let you step through your code line by line so that you can see where it's going wrong.
• Change one thing at a time when debugging and then test your corrections before moving on the next item.
• Separating (packaging) your reusable code from your application-specific code will over time lead to a large, debugged, reusable (without copy/paste) library full of handy utilities. This will aid in writing more powerful and stable applications in less time as your library grows.
• After each bigger segment of work, take a break doing something else, then review what you have written with a fresh mind; rethink and rewrite it, making it more effective and elegant by using less code. Repeat until perfect.
• A program such as Visual Basic .Net can cost a lot of money to purchase and upgrade, and it's syntax style is very different than most other languages. If you MUST use visual basic, go out and download Visual Studio Beta (or trial version) from www.microsoft.com or you may buy the student or learning editions.
• Remember programming languages like Java, PHP, Python and Ruby, available at no cost. Also, if you want to (must) use a Microsoft but not Visual Basic, there are free open source IDEs for C#, whose syntax resembles Java, etc.
• Use an IDE (Integrated Development Environment). A good IDE will have a colour-coded editor built it, with code hints and code completion that make editing faster and less prone to spelling mistakes. It will usually have a debugger built in too.
• Use version control management. Tools like CVS or SVN make it even easier to track code changes and bugs. Once you get used to it you won't look back.
• Customers and bosses aren't concerned with how your program works nearly so much as they are with how well it works. Think bottom line. Clients are intelligent, but busy. They won't care what kind of data structures you're using, but they will care if it speeds up performance by 10%.

Related Links:

Nine Steps To Improve Your Programming Skills
Six Points To Improve Your Programming Skills