- When you wanting to learn a new technology
like Android app development or IOS development,
is it better to learn both the technology
and the programming language
that you need to programme in at the same time?
Or should you become an expert first
in the programming language?
Let's talk about that in this video.
(pop music)
Welcome back, my name is Tim Buchalka
and this is the programming tip of the day.
Again, the question was should you,
when you're wanting to learn new technology,
learn both the technology and the programming language
at the same time, or should you, in fact,
become a master or, you know,
really learn the programming language first,
before you start.
In general, you'll find that a lot of courses
actually trying and teach both.
So what they try and do is
they'll teach the relevant framework,
the relevant technology,
Android app development, IOS development,
Spring development, whatever it is,
and they'll bundle a portion of the course.
It's sort of a bit like a crash course
in that programming language.
So in Java, Swift or whatever underlying language.
So, keep in mind.
that if you are starting out for the first time
and you've never programmed before,
it can often be a good idea to either start with a tutorial
and go through and finish that section of the course
that's got the tutorial, and if you find
that you're still not, you know, really familiar
with the concepts and everything's still
a little bit unclear, you might then wanna move over
and pick a dedicated programming course
in that language before you continue.
And that's because it's really a prerequisite
to know programming
and know that particular language fairly well
if you hope to actually create apps
in that relevant platform.
Or I'm saying apps
because I use the example of Android and IOS,
but of course, this applies to any technology
that you're looking to get into.
And another example would be Unity.
If you're looking to get into that to create games,
you know, C# is the programming language
that most people use this days
so it's a good idea to learn that.
So, to give you a quick example, here,
my first course on Udemy,
it was actually my second one,
my first one wasn't a programming course as such.
My second one was Android app development.
What I decided to do was bundle, I read about,
I think off memory it was something
about seven hours of Java tutorial,
which the idea of that was just to teach
the absolute basics of Java,
so that someone who was learning it for the first time
had enough knowledge,
so that the app development part of the course made sense.
Now, there wasn't enough time in that course to do justice
to the Java programming language.
And actually, based on student feedback,
I created a masterclass, which has now ballooned
into a 77 hour dedicated course on java.
But the thing was that I still recommended for students
to go through the tutorial section first,
do that seven hours.
And after that, if they still felt
they could use some more training,
to then decide to transition over
and find a dedicated course on that programme language,
Java in this case.
So that's what I would generally, here, advise you to do,
is to start with a course
because a lot of courses these days you'll find
in these technologies and these frameworks,
will give you a bit of an overview.
They'll actually sort of bundle that section of training,
as I mentioned for the programming language.
Go through that training first
and see how you feel after it.
Make a decision then whether you wanna learn
more about the programing language, before you move on.
And realise that it's a decision you can make in the future,
you don't need to make that now.
I mean, you might decide to do that tutorial
and then do more of the course.
And you might find you might get half way through
the course and get a bit stuck.
That time, you can go back then
and consider investing in another course,
perhaps a dedicated course on that programming language.
But the other quick thing I wanna point out here
is that it can be a bit of a got you,
because if the person teaching the course
doesn't know the programming language really well,
and that can actually be the case,
in more times than you (laughs) probably can imagine.
Probably more times than I care to admit
that I've said this in the past.
Be careful that you're not learning bad practises
from that particular course,
because often, you'll find that the technology
is the main part of the course and the programming tutorial
is just added on.
It's almost something they think they need to have
and they haven't put necessarily the dedicated care
and training into that.
So make sure that the skills of the instructor,
you know, you research that to make sure
they are actually qualified to teach you
that programming language
and, you know, they've got the skills
to be able to pull that off.
Because you wanna learn programming,
you wanna learn programming the right way.
Alright, so I'll end the video here,
but basically, keep that in mind.
Start out and you can consider using the tutorials
that are built into the course,
but then consider whether you need dedicated programming
law course, or to go through that course,
in that given programming language in the future.
Alrighty, so I hope that helped.
If you've got any questions,
feel free to leave a comment
and I'll get back to you.
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