The urge to learn something new is a great feeling, and if you’re playing around with the idea of learning how to code — consider yourself heartily encouraged to do so. But when it comes to studying, getting started can be a real struggle, and I know that from experience. Some people jump right in and just start hacking stuff together until it works, but that isn’t me.
Opening up VS Code just seemed scary — and more than that, pointless. Sure, I could probably make the computer print “Hello, world” by copying something I saw on Reddit, but what exactly is the point if I don’t have the slightest clue why it works or how it happened? Programming is such an alien topic to a non-techie like me, and diving in without knowing anything about how it or computers work just felt crazy.
So, after some general moping and procrastinating, I decided to approach things from a different direction.
The fun way is the best way
I like studying quite a lot, and since it’s a bit of a hobby in my eyes, it’s natural for me to do whatever sounds most fun. It’s quite common for people to go in the opposite direction, however, and want to do only what’s most efficient. In every learning community I frequent, I see these beginner questions all the time about “the best way to learn.”
In my opinion, the fun way is always the best way. The person who succeeds in learning a new thing is never the person who “studies the correct way,” it’s just the person who keeps going. Even if you miss something important in the early stages, as long as you keep going, you’ll hit a point when you need to fill that gap to progress. So you’ll fill it, and you’ll move on — and in the end, the how and when won’t even matter.
When I first thought about learning how to code, I felt more sure about how I didn’t want to do it rather than how I did want to do it. I knew I didn’t want to start writing programs when I had no idea what made those programs work. I knew that the mystery of it would just nag at me and distract me, and I also believed that understanding a bit about computers would help my understanding of programming down the line as well.
So I found a book called “Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software” by Charles Petzold. There were good reviews from both students and experienced programmers, and it seemed to start right at the very beginning, which I liked. But when I looked at the topics covered in the different chapters (binary codes, logic with switches, bytes and hexadecimal, adding with logic gates, registers and busses, CPU control signals, etc), I still felt a little overwhelmed. I knew I wanted to read it, but I still felt like I needed to start somewhere a little more in my comfort zone.
Luckily, there is one subject that is right in my comfort zone and can be applied to just about any topic: history. I enjoyed it in school, I studied it at university, and I love a good history book or historical drama. There are also some pretty well-known figures mixed in with the history of computers who I was already aware of — names like Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, George Boole, and Alan Turing. So, I decided to set the Code book aside and ease myself into the world of computer science by reading about its beginnings.
The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing
This book is by Martin Davis and it’s available as an ebook through Amazon. If you’re into history, I thoroughly recommend giving it a read, but there’s also some use in reading it even if you’re not much of a history buff. If you can’t seem to get started with this whole programming thing, picking up a book on the subject is a great way to technically begin studying without really feeling like you’re studying.
The book gets quite mathematical at points since it focuses a lot on the mathematicians whose work eventually became integral to the invention of computers. I’m not a math person at all, I’m quite terrible with numbers really, but math is one of those topics where understanding just how little you understand is kind of useful in itself.
Let’s go off on a tangent here. I think math presents quite a barrier to people when they think about computers and programming. It can certainly feel like a field you shouldn’t even bother trying to get into if you’re not good at math — and there was probably a time when that was true (though it was quite a while ago). Either way, it is not true anymore.
Math and science are what build computers — there’s no doubt about that. But programming is different. When you’re writing programs or designing software, math is more of a choice than a necessity.
The reason for this can be boiled down to one word that you’ll probably hear a lot if you do start studying: abstraction. Understanding computers is all about dealing with different levels of abstraction — which essentially means putting things in boxes and forgetting about them. That sounds like a joke, but it’s true.
For instance, any programming book or computer science course is probably going to start by explaining what binary is — the little 1s and 0s from The Matrix. You’ll learn what they are, why they exist, and what we use them for — and then you’ll put all that knowledge in a box and close the lid. Because when you start typing code, you won’t be thinking about binary. You don’t type it, you don’t do binary calculations, and you’ll really only think in bytes (groups of 8 binary digits) rather than bits (one binary digit).
Working with binary is a super-specialized job that most programmers will never do — so they close the lid of the binary box and focus on other things. Using math in programming is similar — people who are good at it will take care of the math for you and put it in a box called a “function.”
You can peek inside the box and see what’s going on if you want, but you don’t need to. You just “call” the function when you want to use it. Say you want to find out how many characters are in a string of text — it takes a lot more effort to make a computer work this out compared to a human just looking and counting “1, 2, 3.” But you don’t need to think about all that — just call the strlen() (string length) function and it will do the counting for you. That’s what the function is called in C, anyway. In Python it’s len() and in Java it’s length(). Different language, different words.
The point is, the math is taken care of one way or another. It’s hidden away in functions and libraries, and if you suspect you might need something math-y to fix your problem, it’s standard practice to find the information online.
If you really, really hate numbers, you can also just stick to high-level programming. The higher the level, the further away you are from the 1s and the 0s, and the less you have to think about math. All of this is to say — don’t let math scare you away from programming. You can avoid it while coding just like you can avoid it in life!
So, anyway, I read this book about the history of computers. I learned all about these mathematicians and what they achieved — without understanding a thing about the actual math, of course — and I thoroughly enjoyed myself.
Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
Next, I needed to get a little more down to business — which meant reading the book about how computers work. Like I said before, this book felt a little bit scary at first. It’s big and it’s detailed — and I’m not going to pretend I understood every word I read. But we don’t get anywhere by letting “good” be the enemy of “perfect.” Understanding 80% of a book is way better than understanding 0% because you decided not to read it.
Besides, it wasn’t that bad in the end. It’s written in a friendly, chatty, and humorous way, which really helps make the complicated bits feel easier to get through. It also has a website with interactive diagrams and working versions of the “mini computers” he makes throughout the book. And, most importantly, it doesn’t start with the complicated stuff.
It doesn’t even start with computers — the first chapters cover some pretty random topics like Morse code and braille. Or, at least, they feel random for a while until you get further in and realize Mr. Author has been sneakily drip-feeding you the concepts you’ll need to know later on in the book.
It’s definitely one of those “trust in the process” kind of experiences — but I can assure you it’s a well-written, well-structured book, and no matter how hard the hard bits feel to you, you’ll still come away knowing more about computers than you ever thought possible.
When you’re done, you can get another box out and stuff all the information inside — because we don’t really need to think about “how a computer works” when we’re coding. However, now that you have that information tucked away somewhere, it will come in handy at times. Certain programming concepts will naturally make more sense to you, and when the knowledge is relevant to what you’re doing, it will conveniently pop out of the box for you to make use of.
And the best part? When you start your programming course and it starts talking about binary — you’ll already know what binary is. The course will give you plenty of new information too, but having that existing context in your head will help things feel a little more familiar and manageable. This will help you focus on the programming, rather than getting distracted by every new concept and wondering whether you need to understand it or not.
That’s how it felt for me, anyway, and I’m about as badly built for programming as humanly possible. I sucked at math in school, I studied history and English literature at university, I write for a living, I study Japanese as a hobby, and until recently I had never even owned a desktop PC — and yet it’s kinda going okay. If I can do it then, honestly, anyone can.
