Question Beginner C# student struggling

Dustin31288

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Nov 19, 2018
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Hello everyone, first let me introduce myself. My name is Dustin and I am attending schooling to obtain my certification in C#. To do this I must score good on my NOCTI exam.

We are still into the basic things as far as the work goes. Microsoft visual studio c# 2017 edition is the book we use. We are on chapter 4 which is using if statements.

I am struggling to remember things from earlier chapters and always have to refer back to them. Especially the 2nd chapter which pertains to data. More than half of the time I can’t even complete an exercise because I either don’t remember or understand it, even with reading it through the chapter.

I am really starting to think that this is something I won’t be able to be good at. Every time we finish the chapter and start the exercises, I can’t seem to ever do them on my own.

I feel like I need to start all over again. I’m 30 years old, working full time and going to school during the day.

What can I do ? I will not give up, but I’m feeling very upset because I’m trying very hard.
 
No one can make any guarantees because it may be that you just don't have an aptitude for programming. Not everyone does. I think I'm a bit of a natural at programming but there are plenty of other things that I have no aptitude for and wouldn't succeed at no matter how hard I tried. We can't be good at everything.

That said, there are things you can do to improve the way you think that will make you better at writing code. I find that the biggest mistake that beginners tend to make is basically trying to pluck code out of the air without knowing what it has to do. They know what the end result is supposed to be but not what the steps are to get there and so they don't really know what the code is supposed to. You can think of code as being like a machine and you couldn't build a machine to produce a specific end result if you didn't understand the process to get to that end result, so you shouldn't try to write code without knowing what steps it has to perform first.

Programming doesn't exist in a vacuum. It is generally an abstract implementation of a physical process. You should be sure to understand the physical process first and, if it helps, use a pen and paper to write it down. Pretend that, rather than being a programming problem, you have to achieve your task physically. Not only that, rather than doing it yourself, you have to write a set of instructions for someone else to follow. Those instructions ned to be foolproof, so you need to break the whole process down into as small steps as possible and explain them in detail. Once you have done that, you have yourself an algorithm. You should be able to work through that algorithm using pen and paper with any input and get the desired output.

Only when you have a working algorithm should you consider writing any code. The code you write needs to implement the algorithm which means two important things. Firstly, it means that each time you write code, you'll be writing two or three lines at the most to implement each step of the algorithm. It also means that, at any time, you can refer back to your algorithm and compare your code to it to make sure the code actually does what it is supposed to.
 
Hi
I have also just studying on my own to do C#, I also struggled, but I found once I started doing exercises and writing code, I remembered it much better, and it started falling into place. I never moved onto the next chapter until I had a grasp on the one I was busy with.

Persevere, and try out all the examples and questions
 
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