The following is a post by Raul Pefaur, the new community manager of QuantConnect. Raul has a Masters in Finance from Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago Chile. He recently graduated and is looking to apply his knowledge in QuantConnect. Over the next few weeks he will post about his journey to learn C# and design his first algorithmic strategies.

This week I started my journey to learn C#. I have almost no previous coding skills; last week I finished my first programming course ever, in JavaScript, at Codeacademy. I want to start using QuantConnect backtesting tools, but as you may know, I need to know C#. What I want to do is to share my experience with you, how I studied, what have I learned, resources, and maybe this can help a few of you that are in a similar position as I am.

I have usually had a bad time trying to learn a programming language by just reading books, so my experience with Codeacademy was great. But, until now, there is no such way to learn C#. Given this, I started to look for online video lectures that could help me, and in fact, they did.

At the date I wrote this blog post, I have seen the basics of C#: data types, classes, objects, class constructors, properties, methods, arrays, and I think that’s it. It wasn’t that hard to understand, given I have just finished my course in JavaScript I have some notion about this stuff (generally speaking).

To achieve this, I started with a free courser course called Beginning Game Programming with C#. It is focused on game programming, but it has very easy to understand lectures about C#; it is assumed you have no knowledge at all. As you may guess, you should just watch the C# related lectures, because there are tons of others that are game related. I watched these videos in x1.5 – x1.75 speed, because besides the professor talked way to slow, there was a lot of stuff not worthy.

If you would like a more serious lecture, I recommend Udemy’s course Programming for Complete Beginners in C#. It is great, I have just finished it (given that when I started it I already knew some basics), and I really regret I did not started with this one. The catch: it is not free; it costs $45 USD, but totally worth it (you should see if there are any discount coupons around). It has coding examples and challenges, where you start coding your first programs in C#.

As the time of this post, I’m able to at least understand almost every Starter Algorithm in QuantConnect (specially the basic template). I still need to learn way more, so I will keep you posted in how my journey in learning C# works.

I hope this blog post encourages those who don’t know C#, and are interested in using QuantConnect tools. It has been way easier than I thought, and if I can help you with anything in your learning process, feel free to contact me raul@quantconnect.com. I’m not a C# expert, but I may be useful to you while I’m also learning.

See you soon!