How to Learn to Code Apps From Scratch

Unless you’ve been living deep inside of a cave—not just any cave, mind you, but one without internet access or television reception, you’re well aware of how important apps are in our everyday lives. Whether you’re checking the weather, sweeping for mines, accessing your contacts list, or writing an article on a computer, you use apps all of the time to get information more quickly and perform operations more speedily. Having programming skills is a crucial part of being a competitive employee, no matter what field you enter, so finding out how to learn to code apps is an essential step toward becoming an attractive prospect.

In this guide, we walk you through the app-coding process and start you on the path toward building programs from scratch. We look at the best languages to learn and what goes into wireframing. Creating your first app can be a rocky road, but our guide will smooth the way for you and help your app-coding experience be a painless one. Developing working applications on your own will build your confidence and demonstrate your ability to employers, so let’s get started and get you coding!

Know Your Languages

Finding the right language to program your app with is both the most important and treacherous part of learning to code. Different languages will offer different advantages and disadvantages, so you should take the time to find the best language for your desired app functionality. It’s easy to get sucked into language selection and find yourself mired in a sea of too much choice and nitpicking, which can obscure the original goal and leave you confused and discouraged. It’s best to do your homework, find a language that you think you can work with, and move forward without second-guessing yourself too much.

Some languages are optional, but you’ll have to learn some standard ones just to get started. Python and Ruby are excellent first languages as they are reasonably intelligible to laypersons and easy to pick up. If your planned app is going to include backend architecture (if you’re going to do any work with databases or connect to online features, then it will), you’ll be well served to get some SQL knowledge under your belt, too. PHP, Java, C#, and Go are all excellent languages to get learned up in, also.

It’s Design Time

Now that you’ve earmarked the languages you’ll use to code your app, it’s time to have a little fun. A huge part of developing a successful app is the design stage. You’ll need to take the time to plot out the app’s performance and desired behavior on both the back and front end. The beauty of this part of the process is how enjoyable it can be. You’ll get to do lots of plotting and behavior planning, and you’ll have a blast mocking up your UI and front-end functions.

You’ll need to plan your UI flow to ensure that your users have clear and understandable routes to your app’s features, and you’ll also need to map out any connections to external data sources or hosts. Use wireframing to design your UI, including button functionality and appearance. To plan the backend framework, use an entity-relationship model (ERM) to diagram data relationships.

We hope that you enjoyed this look at how to learn to code apps. While apps have become commonplace in our modern world, getting started learning to build apps can be a daunting and challenging proposition. Our guide will help you get going in the right direction and will soon have you producing complex applications and finding amazing programmer positions as a result!