Technology is increasingly a large part of our lives. By learning to program, you can take advantage of this fact.
Programming is a necessary skill for software engineers and data scientists, but it can bring value in many other fields as well.
By learning programming you can bring ideas to life, automate tedious tasks, save time and money, and sharpen your mind.
Learning to code widens your horizons. You'll start to see opportunities where previously there were none.
Anytime you find yourself doing a boring or time-consuming task on your computer, you can automate it by writing a program that does the task for you.
Examples include renaming and downloading many files, extracting text from PDFs, collecting data from web pages, placing text onto images, and much more. You can even write a bot that plays games for you or posts to social media.
When you train programming, you're also training your ability to solve problems. As you get better at programming, you start to internalize breaking complex problems into smaller doable steps. You train your working memory. You become better at precise reasoning and logic. All these improvements carry over into the rest of your life.
Programming is increasingly relevant even in jobs that aren't directly related to software engineering. Knowing basic programming means you can offer significantly more value at your workplace. There are few people who can program, and far more people who need their abilities. Programmers are enormously in demand.
The fastest way to learn programming is with lots of practice. Learn a programming concept, then write code to test your understanding and make it stick. Try our online interactive Python course today—it's free!
Python Principles