Work Through Each Problem First!!!!

(Copied and pasted from: https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-fundamentals/supplement/Hfzrw/next-steps)

At this point, you should have a basic grasp on the idea of developing simple algorithms. This skill is one that you will practice as you go through the rest of this book, as every programming problem's key component is figuring out the correct algorithm. We cannot underscore enough the importance of working through problems in a step-by-step fashion. Many novice programmers try to skip over the first several steps and plunge right into writing code. The result is frequently a disaster, which they end up spending orders of magnitude more time trying to fix than they would have spent planning correctly in the first place.

The reasons that novice programmers give for skipping straight to step 5 vary, but a common one is "Step 3 (writing a generalized algorithm) seemed too hard." This reason is quite possibly the worst reason to skip over step 3—if making a correct plan is proving hard, how can you possibly hope to write correct code without the plan? It is better to repeat steps 1 and 2 on more examples until you can find the pattern and write down the algorithm. Another common reason that novice programmers give for skipping the first steps is "to save time"; however, they often then report spending countless hours trying to debug the resulting code. It is well worth ten or even thirty minutes of planning to avoid trying to debug a hopeless mess for multiple hours!