Learning to code

anithmuk

How hard is it to actually learn how to code and how long on average will it take to get competent with it? Also, how much can the performance of the average game be improved by coding it and using say, corona, as opposed to gamesalad and is it worth the extra effort? Right now I'm enjoying learning to use gamesalad but I was just curious about this, thanks.

peachpellen

Asking "How long will it take to learn how to code" is like asking how long a piece of string is.

If you are talking about Lua, the language Corona uses, then it depends on your past coding experience as well as what skills you need to make your apps.

If you have no coding experience I'd say a month to be truly comfortable with Lua, or there abouts.

anithmuk

Oh lol, I really have no idea what I'm doing/talking about, I just started this whole programming and game designing thing about a week ago and was just curious about my options.

Snow

Learning to program is an ongoing experience. The way I learned was first I was learning to make simple functions in Flash in Actionscript 2. Years later I found this:

see.stanford.edu

Stanford has free programming courses that are basically recordings of classrooms lectures and assignments that are then made freely available. Do the introductory program. It's all on your own time and the instructor in the lectures is the best programming instructor I have ever known. He knows how to break down complex processes and explain them in English.

The course is CS106. These courses are actually meant for Software Engineers, but this first class starts right at the very beginning - in fact the instructor asks students, how many have used computers before. By the end of the course, students are able to program games and other complex programs.

The best of this is that the programming language you learn is Java, which just happens to be the best programming language in the Universe. It is even the number 1 language on Omicron Persei 8.

The other reason that this course is highly recommended is that you learn PROPER coding. If you learn how to do proper programming, then you learn how to make efficient, clean programs and it is much easier for you to maintain or update. And if you learn proper coding, you learn how to program faster as you will realize the order of operations that make programs work, a lot faster.

anithmuk

Thanks for the info, I'll check it out