Programming is an activity I have been interested in for almost a decade. It has become a big part of my life and will become a part of my future career. Maybe you will want to do something programming adjacent in the future, whether that be cybersecurity, game development, information technology, and much more. If you’re interested in one of those things, and do not have much programming experience, this article will show you how to get started.

The first piece of the puzzle is figuring out what language you want to program in. A programming language is a way to write code in a human-readable format. Any code ran by a computer is binary, 1s and 0s in a specific way so a computer can understand it. But that isn’t very useful for a human programmer, so programming languages are used to make this much easier. There are many different languages out there, but the one that I recommend to start with, and the one many others start with, is Python. Python is a very human-readable language, which is what makes it good for beginners. It’s almost like the code is being written in English with few exceptions.

The next step is to figure out what IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, to program in. This is a text editor where all your code will be written. There are many options for IDE’s out there, and you can use pretty much any text editor. A good IDE will color important phrases, give suggestions (or “autofill”), run code easily, and provide an easy way to manage programming files (called a “tree”). For Python, my personal pick is PyCharm. It does all of the above, and it’s a free program. VSCode is also a good choice for Python, although it does not provide a one-click solution to run Python code.

Now you are ready to write some code! Open PyCharm (or whatever IDE you chose) and create a new project. There should be a file autogenerated called “main.py”, this is the file that will be ran, and where you will write some code. There are great resources out there to teach you the ins and outs of programming. If you want to learn the very basics of Python, I would recommend checking out GeeksforGeeks “Learn Python Basics” tutorials, a free resource. The series covers variables, loops, functions, and more that will be fundamental to programming anything, not only in Python, but in every programming language. The website also has interactive examples to help you understand what certain blocks of code are doing. Have fun!