What skills do self-taught programmers commonly lack? What should a self-taught programmer study to get up to speed with his/her formally-educated peers?

Self-taught programmers lack a correct way to learn through online courses.

I will describe how you should learn through online courses from YouTube, Udemy, Coursera.

I am from a non computer science background and these online platforms help me learn new technical skills.

Recently I was taking an online lecture on the development of an Android application on YouTube.

I followed all the tutorials and made a small todo list application. Now I got stuck at one point. Can I tell someone that I made this application?

But if I say so, I will be wrong because I followed another person and I did nothing on my own.

So I decided to redo the application on my own. But this time I decided that I will not look at the lectures or instructor code and build the application on my own.

I used all the means, such as stackoverflow, Android documentation and Google search to build that Android application. It was surprising that it took me 4 days to create the same application that I had already created.

Now I am sure that I will definitely be able to make a todo application on my own if I only have stackoverflow and google search.

I recently met a senior developer of a startup and he told me that this is how the business world works. You have to find out on your own if you want to create a product with stack-overflow and the Google search available to you.

So I can tell you to learn any new framework or language.

Follow these steps:

1. Suppose you are learning backend using django or Node.js.
2. Watch the good online lectures on various platforms such as udemy, Youtube and create projects together with the Instructor and understand all the necessary things.
3. Creating a project with an instructor does not mean that you have created the project.
4. Try to redo projects on your own or try to build other projects with the help of online resources such as stackoverflow, google search and documentation.
5. This way, you can learn new things very quickly.

Learning new things faster than others in technology and implementing them in a real-world application will always work for you compared to your educated colleagues.

Thanks for reading.

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Further reading:

• What is the successful ways of getting into product based companies with non CS background
• What are 5 common programming problems every beginner needs to know
• What are the common mistakes made by beginner competitive programmers?