How to acheive Proficiency

Question

Hi My Name is Nems An
I am a student and I'm currently learning Visual Basic which is also my first programming language. My question is:
How does one achieve proficiency as a Visual Basic Programmer? I.E. How do you go from feeling lost in all of the dry terminology to writing code comfortably, and creating useable applications?

mike A · Answer

Just keep writing code...find examples via search engines of how to accomplish what you need and try to learn from every challenge. Also keep a personal library of your working code so that you have examples to review when you encounter a similar challenge in the future. I have taught myself VB primarily through lots of google searches for examples of problems I was having. Taking a class is probably a really good idea as it will provide you with a foundation of standard language to use when searching for examples and help on forums. To this day my greatest challenge is communicating clearly what I'm having difficulty with and I have finally enrolled in an intro to VB class at the community college to try and round out my vocabulary so that I can talk about my projects with other developers who have a standardized industry language. Another thing I do is when I have a bit of free time I review my old programming solutions and rewrite the code based on what I've learned which makes my code more efficient and logical as well as cementing new methods I've learned and it keeps solutions I've found to problems fresh in my mind so that I can more easily reference those solutions in the future when I encounter a similar problem. In my experience competant coding has more to do with solid general understanding of how VB programming functions coupld with good search skills and an ability to translate solutions from another problem to my problem than with memorizing the specifics of various solutions.