7 Coding Roadmaps To Learn Code In 2023

Carpal tunnel, macular degeneration, social isolation, an excellent salary, and back problems; if that sounds good, I recommend a career in programming, but how does one learn to?code?as a complete beginner??

Well, the answer is simple: you need to spend countless hours staring at the blue light of a computer screen, hitting the keys, and until something cool comes out the other side learning to code was by far the best investment I ever made in my career.?

It cost approximately zero dollars, thanks to all the free stuff on the internet.

Luckily you don’t need to be very smart, but you do need to work hard and put in the hours required to learn the actual skill. Hours doing what exactly? Where do I even start? Sadly there is no guaranteed step-by-step program.?

Every actual coder must go on their quest and slay their dragons. This article will create seven roadmaps to give you a rough idea of where to start.?

Depending on what you want to do with code, you must find a project that burns a fire in your loins—something to anchor you through the highly frustrating process of learning a new skill.?

For me, that project was a website over five years ago. Still, you can do way more excellent stuff nowadays, like build games, IoT devices, web, mobile, and desktop apps, machine learning, and data analysis, or code up your low-level systems.

If I had to learn to code from scratch today, here’s how I plan it out.?

Web Development Road Map

Let’s start by going down the web development path. Your goal to build the subsequent Twitter web development might be the most challenging path because there are many different cats and ways to skin that.?

But in a nutshell, here’s what you got to do, download an editor like VScode editor, create an HTML file and learn how the structure of a website works.?

Create a CSS file and make that structure look good with custom styling. Next, you’ll need to learn some javascript to make the website interactive.

The crazy thing is that most people don’t use javascript alone but instead bring in a frontend framework to build a UI. If your goal is to get a job, learn React because it’s the most popular.

But if you want to enjoy yourself, you might look into Svelte or Vue instead, which takes care of the front end but to build an app, you also need to backend.?

The easiest way to do that is to bring in a backend as a service like Firebase, Pocketbase, or Supabase that’ll give you user authentication, a database, and file uploads with minimal effort.?

But you’ll also likely need your custom server-side code, and confusingly, the easiest way to do that is with a serverless platform need to learn some node js and understand how HTTP and APIs work on the internet.?

And then, finally, you can bring in a meta framework that matches up to your frontend framework like Next.js Sveltekit or Nuxt, which can put everything you need together in one cohesive package.?

With that, we have a very rough roadmap for web development. But there are about a million quests you could go on along the way.?

You could also tear up this roadmap and use something like java and spring boot ruby on rails or laravel in PHP because virtually every programming language can also build web apps.?

Web development is more complex than any one person’s comprehension. Try to stay focused on the hype. Find a framework you love, get involved in its community, and learn the tools orbit around it.?

Also, following this roadmap step by step or jumping straight into a framework and trying to learn the necessary pieces as you go is fine. I prefer the latter chaotic approach myself.?

Mobile Development Road Map

The web is the ultimate platform, but some applications are just better suited for mobile. If you want to build a mobile app on IOS or Android, you can create the highest quality app by learning how to use dedicated toolchains.?

On ios, you’ll need to own a mac and download the Xcode ide, then learn the swift programming language. On Android, you download android studio and then learn java or kotlin programming language.?

Most mobile apps also need a backend and tools like firebase or AWS amplify or a great place to start learning. Compared to web development, the path forward here is far less windy.?

However, it still takes work, and if you want to build an app for both ios and Android, you’ll have to learn two entirely different languages and platforms.?

Alternatively, you can learn a cross-platform framework such as flutter with the dart programming language, react native with javascript, or Microsoft’s dot net framework with C#. You build apps for both ios and Android from a single codebase.?

Desktop Development Road Map

Although you don’t want to develop a mobile app but rather a desktop app, you can build macOS apps with swift, although you can also use swift to create windows apps.?

At the same time, you can use dot net to build windows apps and dot net Maui to build mac os apps, or maybe you want to develop Linux apps for that; there’s a toolkit called gtk that can build native Linux apps in a variety of different languages.?

You should target all three at the same time frameworks like the electron, and towery allow you to build desktop apps using javascript that runs on any platform.?

If you already know some web development, these can be fantastic tools, but if you’re starting from scratch, you likely want to choose the platform you’re most comfortable with.?

And start by building apps for that platform with its preferred toolchain. What’s depressing about app development, though, is that it can sometimes feel like we’re making nothing in an infinite void, just vaporware that will never feel the touch of an actual human.

Hardware Road Map

Another path you might take is hardware. You can build an IoT device, a robot, or a flamethrower synchronized to your guitar plane.

For this path, you can start building things with a raspberry pi. It’s just a tiny computer where you can learn the Linux operating system basics.?

Once you have it up and running, you can then start learning the python programming language python is the most popular language for beginners.

Because it’s easy to learn and can do almost anything on a raspberry pi, you can connect a breadboard to build circuits and then control their behavior with your python code.?

Another option is to buy an Arduino, which has a microcontroller that can be programmed with its c-like language. Along the way, there’s a ton to learn about circuitry and networking before you eventually connect your IoT device to the cloud.?

At that point, you’ll need to learn some backend development and protocols like MQTT to pass messages between your devices.?

Game Development Road Map

Another great place to start learning to code is by building a game. Modern frameworks like unity and Godot make it possible for the average person to develop an awesome game independently.?

Both frameworks provide an integrated development environment where you can drag and drop different game elements and then change their behavior with code both game engines are based on the C#?programming language.

But Godot also has its purpose-built language that’s a little easier for beginners. Either way, there’s a lot to learn about game physics in addition to 3d modeling with topics like shaders, meshes, ray tracing, and so on.?

Luckily almost everything you need to learn is contained within the game engine, but there’s also a vast ecosystem of third-party assets that you can implement in your code; you need to do everything from scratch.?

As you gain more experience, check out the unreal engine based on the C++ language. It’s more challenging as a beginner but is the engine of choice for many top-tier triple AAA games.?

One of the most exciting fields to get into is machine learning, where you can build artificial intelligence to make yourself obsolete.?

Machine Learning Road Map

Machine learning is tricky because you need more than just making it happen out of thin air. You need to have a whole bunch of data first.

The best way to get started is to participate in data science competitions on Kaggle; here, you can obtain real-world data and analyze it with a community of other data scientists.?

And if you’re good at it, you can win a lot of money before you get to that point. Though you’ll need to learn a language design for scientific computing, the most common options are Julia R and python.?

If you go the python route, you’ll first want to learn libraries like pandas to organize your data map plot lib to analyze the data, and scikit learn to start running some basic machine learning algorithms on it.?

Along the way, you’ll need to learn a lot about math because machine learning is just a fancy way of doing statistics.?

Once the basics are down, you can move into deep neural networks with libraries like TensorFlow and PyTorch, the tools used to build the terrifying modern-day AI applications.?

Low-Level Systems Road Map

The final way to learn to code is by going into systems engineering. When you go to prison, the best way to survive is to find the biggest guy in there and knock them out on your first day.?

You can take a similar approach when learning to code by immediately starting with the c programming language. You see, c is the language used to build almost everything else, like the mac, windows, and Linux operating system kernels and the python interpreter.?

Surprisingly though, c is a pretty easy language to get started with. It needs a lot of other data structures, like a list or dictionary, that you take for granted in python.?

That means you’ll have to implement your stuff from scratch. Lead to understanding how low-level memory management works and how to implement algorithms that most people only study to survive in an interview.?

A trial by fire will make you the most badass in prison. If you go this route, you’ll most likely get your ass kicked, but every developer should try prison just a little bit.?

It’ll make you a stronger humble, and more well-rounded developer no matter what you’re trying to code, and if you enjoy systems engineering, you might learn a language like rust or c++ if you’re a masochist.

Conclusion

And with that, we have seven essential roadmaps that you might use to learn code in 2023, but we’ve barely scratched the surface here. Other skills are universal to almost every one of these paths.?

If you want to learn git and GitHub to version control your software, you’ll need to learn Linux and the bash language for shell scripting.

You should know something about networking, like how HTTP and DNS work and how APIs are built on top of them with standards like rest RPC and graphql.?

I’m not an expert in any of this stuff. I’ve crammed so much into my brain that something falls out on the other side whenever I learn something new.?

It’s normal to feel overwhelmed when learning to code. You want to get good at one thing, like becoming a top ten percent expert in that field.?

It may take years to get there, but if you do it, you’ll likely have an excellent job for the rest of your life. Learning to code is a lifelong journey.?

There’s no final destination, and it can be extremely frustrating and painful, but the reward for suffering is equal to experience, and experience is what makes you money.?