Achieving Programming Language Mastery: A Roadmap
“Champions keep playing until they get it right.”
― Billie Jean King
While I am learning a programming language, I jumped from one topic to another topic without correlating with each other properly, which takes me a long time to understand. I am still learning and trying to correlate the concepts and I thought it should have been better if I would have gone through the steps I outlined below, to master a programming language.
Define Goal and Purpose
Mastering the programming language may take months or years, so every beginner should have a clear goal or plan to achieve it. What I understand is that mostly everyone learns languages to get a job or to turn their ideas into products or it may be any other purpose, it should be better if they choose the domain in which they want to work on because the programming world is an Ocean, and it may take more time if one wants to learn everything at a time. One can set even milestones to track the progress against the learning process so that one can get back on track if they lost in the middle.
This is the fundamental step so I request everyone to set aside time for it before venturing out.
Understanding Basic constructs
It's obvious that, if one needs to master anything, the understanding of the basics should be strong. Basic constructs are like foundations for a building. Any language comes with its syntax, even though syntax might be different the output is the same. One should be able to understand the basic constructs like keywords of language, variables, conditional statements, loops and functions in deep.
Learn Advance Topics
The basics are good enough to construct simple programs, but to write complex applications, one must learn advanced topics like object-oriented programming or structural programming, error handling, debugging, Garbage collection or memory management etc.
Different types of programming paradigms were defined as imperative, procedural, functional, declarative, and object-oriented. These are different styles of programming to solve problems. C language is a procedural language while c++, Java, and Python are object-oriented languages.
Some programming languages are dynamically typed, so no need to understand memory management but one needs to learn memory management concepts in static types languages like C, C++ etc.
Learn Algorithms and Data Structures
One of the most fundamental topics one must learn or understand clearly in the programming world is data structures and algorithms and they are everywhere in the computing world. An algorithm is a procedure or set of rules used for solving a problem or performing a computation. Data is just a fact or information. The data structure is a storage that is used to store and organize data. Efficient applications can be achieved only by designing efficient algorithms and data structures.
Algorithms and data structures are related to each other. Fundamental data structures are arrays, stacks, queues, trees, hash tables, etc. There are different types of approaches to developing algorithms like Brute-force, greedy approach, recursive approach, dynamic programming etc. There are different algorithms for searching like Linear search, Binary search, Breadth-first search, Depth-first search etc. and for sorting like the Bubble sort, Merge sort, Quicksort, Insertion sort etc.
A deep understanding of algorithms and data structures is necessary for developing efficient applications, so one must practice a lot to gain a good knowledge of the subject.
Understand Standard Libraries
Every programming language defines a basic set of components that can be reused by programs and these implementations of reusable components are called Standard Libraries. The standard libraries are designed for common functions that programmers typically need and are useful to a wider range of programmers.
Standard libraries vary from language to language as per the language design or implementation. In Python, there are standard libraries for built-in types, exceptions, text processing, binary data services, data types, numerical modules, functional programming modules, file and directory access, data persistence, compression, cryptography etc.
Learning the standard libraries gives you a quick way to work on the problem instead of writing code from scratch and also gives you an optimized solution as their implementation is optimized and well-tested. Even studying the implementation of the standard libraries gives you in-depth knowledge of the implementations as well as the best practices followed.
Understand Clean Coding
Clean code is clear, understandable and maintainable code. Writing clean code means it is easily understandable by other programmers or coders and also should be easily maintainable.
There are clean coding guidelines like writing comments, variable naming conventions, indentations and maintaining source code structure etc. Principles like KISS (Keep It Simple and Stupid i.e write code as simple as possible), DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself i.e. Avoid unnecessary repetition) and YAGNI (You Aren’t Gonna Need It i.e. Delete what is not needed). Learning these principles and guidelines makes a programmer write elegant code.
Learn Design Patterns
Design patterns are typical solutions to common problems in software design. Each pattern is like a blueprint that you can customize to solve a particular design problem in your code.
There are 23 patterns divided into 3 categories i.e. Creational (5), Structural(7) and Behavioural (11). Creational patterns deal with the creation of objects, Structural patterns deal with a class structure such as inheritance and composition, while behavioural patterns deal with the communication or interaction between objects. These patterns are formulated by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John Vlissides famously called the Gang Of Four.
These patterns apply to object-oriented programming as well as other languages also but they may not work out as elegant as with object-oriented programming because they were articulated based on object-oriented programming.
These patterns can be learnt irrespective of the language one pursues. Understanding gives you the ability to pick up a pattern to solve problems easily and also makes you on the same page as the other developers.
There are other things like SOLID principles for software design and architectural design patterns for building complex applications, one can focus on.
Practice, Practice, Practice
"Knowledge is of no value unless you put it into practice"**― Anton Chekov
Anyone can able to gain some knowledge while reading a book or by completing a course but cannot be able to understand deeply without applying that knowledge in practice. So, one must always practice a lot and also try to solve problems with the language one is learning. Practice should be throughout the learning process so that you will not lose the track of it. While practising one can learn from the mistakes they made and you don't make progress unless you do mistakes.