28 Tips to Become a Successful Programmer

And that you can apply them with relative ease before going forward:

• Inputting and outputting information to users of a program.
• The logical flow and the execution flow of programs in procedural languages.
• Declaring, assigning and comparing variables.
• Branching programming constructs such as if..then..else and select/switch..case.
• Looping constructs such as while..do, do..while/until, for..next.
• Your programming language syntax for creating and calling procedures and functions.
• Data types and manipulating them.
• User defined data types (records/structs/units) and their use.
• If your language supports overloading functions, understand it.
• The memory accessing methods of your language of choice (pointers, peeking, etc.)
• If your language supports operators overloading, understand it.
• If your language supports delegates/function pointers, understand it.

17. Take an introductory course in at least one more programming language in another programming paradigm.

It is recommended to learn one programming language of each paradigm, and most advanced programmers do.

However, you usually start with one, work for a while applying your knowledge and practicing it.

Then learn the other later on, after you already had a real-life experience in programming.

Try one of the following language areas:

• Logic programming paradigm.
• Functional programming paradigm.
• Object-oriented paradigm.

18. Try to compare the two programming languages you learned so far.

Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each one. Usually this is done by:

• Taking simple samples of your early work in the first programming language and re-write it using the second programming language.
• Creating a new project and try implementing it using both languages. Sometimes, depending on your choice of project and languages, you might not be able to implement the project in one of the languages!
• Writing a cheat-sheet or summary-table comparisons between similar constructs in the two languages and features unique to each of the languages.
• Try finding ways to mimic features that is unique to one of the two languages using the other language.

19. Learn visual programming concepts using one of the languages you learned.

Almost all programming languages have versions/libraries that support visual programming.

And others supporting console or console-like programming.

This can be accomplished by:

• Get an introduction to event-driven programming.
• Most visual programming relies in some level on events and events handling (using the programming language you choose).
• Try as much desktop software as you can and understand what the software does. Most software development companies offer beta-testing versions of their products which you can use to test the software. Keep up-to-date on user interface advancements.
• Read some articles or tutorials on graphical user interfaces.

20. Start applying your knowledge on small software projects you design.

Try applying your programming expertise on problems you face in your day-to-day life.

For example, write programs that rename files in mass, compares text files visually, copies the names of files in a directory to memory/text file, and things like that. Keep it simple at first.

21.Successful Programmer:  Create a virtual graduation project.

Complete this to the end, applying the techniques of visual programming you learned so far.

22. Successful Programmer: Become a games programmer (optional).

Game programming is considered, in most of its parts, desktop programming.

If you intend to become a games programmer.

You will need to learn more about game programming after you finish these steps.

A graphics course is a must for game programmers.

And the second language of choice in the preceding steps should be a logic/functional programming language (preferably Prolog or Lisp).

23. Tackle distributed applications programming.

Distributed application programming is considered by many to be one of the hardest to learn and requires diverse knowledge in computer and communication technologies.

24.Make a transfer to a desktop scripting/programming language.

Preferably, one that is a multi-paradigm language such as Python.

Take a simple introduction to that second language.

Java is considered by most programmers to be the language of choice for many reasons.

However, C# is gaining momentum fast in this field. Java and C# are preferred for the following reasons:

• They are object oriented programming languages which shields programmers in large teams from implementation details as they both supports components (units of code, pre-compiled, that perform a certain task and can be used in other programs).
• They support event-driven programming, as well as OO and procedural programming at some level.
• The framework that the language is built upon is distributed by nature (in the case of Java).
• The availability of many ready-made packages that deal with networking, both as open-source code and framework built-in packages; this makes it easier for programmers to build upon the work of others.

25. one or more of the following technologies.

It is recommended that you get at least an introduction to all of them.

Most distributed application programmers do not stop at one or two programming languages, but learn at least one programming language on each operating system.

That is because if you want your application to be “distributed”, you should provide a version of it at least for each major operating system.

• Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)
• Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)
• Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX)
• Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM)
• .NET Remoting
• XML Web Services

26. Successful Programmer: Try to mimic simple, already established libraries, especially open-source ones.

This is useful during the early phase of becoming a library/package programmer.

Start with simple packages like units conversion and intermediate scientific calculations packages.

If you are a college student, make use of your non-programming courses.

By trying to implement their equations and scientific core as libraries.

27.Successful Programmer: Search for and try open-source packages in your field of programming.

First download binaries/executables of the package.

Try to use it and find its strong and weak points.

After you’ve done that, download the source and try to figure out how it was done.

Try to recreate those libraries or parts of them.

At first, do that after you’ve seen the code and later before you see the code. At later phases, try improving those libraries.

28. Learn the different approaches used to distribute and deploy components to programmers.

• Usually, library/package programmers tend to think recursively and/or iteratively of all problems they are presented with. Try to think of each problem as a collection of smaller problems (a sequence of simpler tasks) or as a repeated process of reducing the problem’s scope to smaller scopes and then piling those scopes upon each other.
• Library/package programmers tend to generalize.
• That is, when presented with a simple specific problem, they usually think of a more general problem and try to solve that general problem which will automatically solve the smaller one.