Programming is the foundation of success for Computer and Information Technology Engineers as well as Engineers from Electronics and other fields. Most of the students feel amazed when they hear this word for the first time and find this term interesting. However, in 8+ years of work experience in IT industry, I have seen that a majority of engineers are either afraid of this term or are not well-versed with the term. A large number of students who pass out of graduation in computers domain are not able to write quality programs and face failure in their jobs.

Programming actually is a term that should be understood and handled carefully. When in college, most of the students take programming and its strategies fore-granted. When they are given some task to perform, they just start hitting the keyboard buttons without actually preparing a working layout of solution in their minds or on paper. This results in a directionless coding which ends up in a messed up code that either does not give any result or produces unwanted results. Many times the results are drawn but the code they had written is not of good quality.

In this article today, I will share some knowledge and strategies about how to start with programming. What need to be done when you first encounter this term and plan to make it the route towards your success.

Let's start. The very first thing that you need to understand is the word Programming itself. Programming is not just a work in which code has to be written, not at all !!! In fact I always take programming as an Art ... an art of writing food programs. Art means you, as a programming, known what it takes to write a good and effective program. You should understand what is expected from a good program. This is where most of the student fails. They don't consider the basic necessities of a program and just starts typing the code. Following are some of the essential factors that play crucial role in marking a program as really good:

1. Lines of code: It affects the compilation process. Compilation means conversion of the code written by you into binary form, a language understood by the computers. The more line of code the there, the more time it takes to compile and more are the chances of errors, both logical and syntatic.

2. Resources consumption: Resources are in terms of CPU, Memory and many other factors. The more resources your program consumes, program execution goes slow as well as chances of deadlocks and other issues increases.

3. Memory consumption: Most of the coders do not understand the value of memory and keeps on taking variable for no use or use them for single purpose. They don't try to minimize or reuse then variables when their values are no more required. This increases the overhead of storing and accessing variable values repeatedly and also consumes more memory space.

4. Accuracy: The program should produce accurate results as intended in the problem statement.

5. Testing of code: Most coders try to execute their program with the intended values only. They skip the essence of testing their code for non-eligible values, taking character value in integral variable for example. The code should be well tested before delivery.

6. Fail over: The program should not fail in heavy load and should be able to recover in real time.

7. Fast: The program execution and result production to be fast and reliable.

8. Flow of Statement: Using the conditional and looping statements as well as function at right place and at the right time can speed up the program rather than writing the same code again and again. Even coders should consider recursive programming, where ever possible.

Thus, programming is not about just typing some lines of code to get a result. It is a lot more than that and considering the above points and brushing up your skills accordingly will benefit you greatly in our corporate life.

That's all for today. If you like the article or you have something to say, feel free to comment in the box below. Keep coming back for more ... Happy Programming !!!