A Beginner’s Guide to Programming | How to Start Coding

As someone from a non-technical background, the word ‘Programming’ would itself be enough to send shivers down your spine! So, you must be thinking ‘Why should I even put in the effort to learn Programming’?

Well, programmers are in high demand all over the world and the median salary of a computer programmer is 100,000k$ per annum. And with the advent of artificial intelligence and the threat of many jobs becoming automated, you don’t have to be scared at all, because it will be you who will help in automating tasks as a computer programmer! Also, there are still many systems for the next several decades that still require human intelligence, coupled with the ability to write code that makes this a very secure job option.

Now, that we know the importance of programming, let’s understand what exactly it is!

To answer that, let me ask a question! How do humans communicate with each other? We humans use a common language to speak with each other, isn’t it?

Similarly, if we have to speak with a computer, we need to learn a language which the computer can understand! And this is where a programming language comes in.

So, simply put, we solve real-world problems, by speaking with the computer in a language it actually understands.

Let’s take the example of a calculator!

When you feed in ‘1234 * 4321’ in the calculator. It immediately shows you, the result is ‘5,332,114’. How was the calculator able to do this multiplication?

This was possible because you wrote in a simple program to multiply two numbers which the calculator can understand.

Similarly, when you ask Siri, what is the distance between the sun and The Earth, it would immediately reply, “The distance is 148.63 million km”.

Now, how is this possible?

This is possible, because there is a program running in the background which takes in the audio input, converts it into a language which ‘SIRI’ can understand, processes the information and gives an output. Tip: Start to write a one program a day with dedication and you will learn coding easily.