You too can learn how to code

Photo by Chris Ried on Unsplash

Almost anyone can learn how to program a computer, or, as it’s more fashionable to call it now, “coding.” You too can learn how to “code,” and I intend to show you that by getting you started on a simple Tic-Tac-Toe game.

Not that there is any shortage of “you too can learn how to code” articles here on Medium, though such articles generally focus more on the author’s own life journey and rarely say anything about a specific programming project.

I will cover a little bit of my journey up to this point before diving into the Tic-Tac-Toe project. I started learning programming in my teen years. I read Problem Solving and Structured Programming in Pascal by Elliott B. Koffman front to back when I didn’t have a computer equipped with the Pascal programming language, or any computer at all.

In high school, I discovered that IBM-compatible PCs came with Microsoft QBasic. I copied a GW-Basic program for drawing fractals from a book, and made a couple of optimizations in the process of adapting it for QBasic.

I also wrote a sort-of scroller video game, in which a spaceship must navigate an asteroid field without getting shot at by the enemy ships. It was primitive compared to the video games available at the time, but for not having my own computer, it was something to be proud of.