Cognitive dissonance?
 

Hey I've Been Programming for about a month now and for some reason I'm just having a hard time learning and understanding it. I'm programing in Java and would just like to know if this is the usual Cognitive dissonance of first learning or if I'm just plain not so good. I'm a pretty smart person in general so I'm surprised I'm having so much trouble. Just wondering if anyone had any suggestions or imput. Thanks in advance.:icon_cheesygrin:

Re: Cognitive dissonance?
 

Hard to say, it does (in general) take a certain mindset to be good at programming, some people naturally just get it, others don't (my brother for example, spent years trying to be good at it, and then decided to move onto the server part of the business).

So, it really depends, what part of it are you really having a hard time with?

Re: Cognitive dissonance?
 

So, what conflicting beliefs or experiences are creating this dissonance? Self esteem versus a perceived inability to learn?

I would suggest you take a small chunk of material, go sit on the corral fence, and think about why it is so (or said to be so). Then add another chunk. Look at the material not as a set of dictated rules (though they may be) but as a logical way (one way) to approach solving a problem.

Re: Cognitive dissonance?
 

No one can be an expert at everything or anything. It might not be your strong point. For example, I couldn't study medicine if my life depended on it.
If you have the motivation, you may be successful.
When I first started programming as a student, I wasn't sure about it. A week later I was sure I made the right choice.

NOTE TO EVERYONE: Is it just me or is there alot of career advice and / or career motivation threads on this forum lately.

Re: Cognitive dissonance?
 

you can try other sources of learning. finding one that you understand better may help. Don't be overwhelm by new concepts. Do what DaWei said, chunk at a time.

Re: Cognitive dissonance?
 

How have you been learning? Maybe everything you've been doing is boring.

Re: Cognitive dissonance?
 

Depending on what source you've tried learning from, Thinking in Java (free to download ebook) might help, on top of what everyone else said.

Re: Cognitive dissonance?
 

Answering Dawei the Dissonance is coming from not unnecessarily from me not getting it but this doubt that I have about whether I'm any good at it compared to others. Ok instead of just replying Immediately I decide maybe I should try out the advise. So I did. Or am is a better way of putting it. I started looking at my simple java programs mostly examples in books and thought and explored how they really work and how they might be useful. For instance declareing a variable in my mind always seemed useful in a math sense (too much algebra 1) but after thinking about it variables are incredibly important. They're how you manipulate data by changing the value of the variable it can change the whole program really quick instead of having to change everything which I would Imagine is useful in a lot of code. Taking it chunk by chunk doesn't feel faster in the in the short run but in the long run it makes it so you really understand topics and don't have relearn ideas later so thanks DeWei.
I'm using this guide to programing http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkapjava/ and it's working good for the time being I have yet to try out what Klipt suggested but I will shortly. Thats all I think thanks for all the help and I'm pretty good with HTML/CSS so thats something I could always fall back on if java doesn't work.

Re: Cognitive dissonance?
 

Programming is as much a way of thinking as it is knowing all the rules to a specific language.
keep in mind that you can always refer to the manual for language specific rules, there are only so many canned solutions to common problems you will come up against, the rest is up to you.

My problem solving skills have gotten so much better since I've been programming. My language skills on the other hand could be better - knowing how to express a solution to a problem in code/math is the difficult part of programming.

as it stands I personally think that beginning programmers should be learning higher level interpreted languages like ruby and python, but thats just my opinion.

The bottom line is a lot of people are never able to train their brain to be a problem solving machine, or learn another language. Are you good at mathematics? Have you ever studied any other informal languages other than English?

Re: Cognitive dissonance?
 

I'm ok at mathematics but I think I have more potential then I'm using. I know no other informal languages but just wondering besides mathematics, programing, and Science (h2O) are there any other informal languages?