Five Ways for New Coders to Turn Mistakes into Mastery

Learning software development is a long journey, and along the way, the bad habits we pick up without realizing it can hold us back from improving.

Avoiding common mistakes will help you learn to code more effectively. In this article, I will cover five things you should avoid to master coding quickly.

Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

1) Don’t try to memorize code

Trying to memorize every line of code is the most common mistake of beginners. Programming is not a chemistry or mathematics formula. If you want to master coding quickly, instead of memorizing the code, you should focus on understanding the logic behind it.

For example, if you learn the logic behind the for loop, you can use this logic in every programming language. But if you only focus on the syntax, you will struggle to write for loop in another programming language. Real-world projects are more complex and huge than the code you memorized.

Coding isn’t about memorization. It’s about remembering what tools are available to you and then looking up the exact syntax for those tools.

When I need information, I look it up. After checking something several times, it starts to stay in my mind. But if I don’t use that knowledge for a while, I might forget it and need to look it up…