Dear community, an MM consultant contacted me on LinkedIn. First of all, nothing special. People are happy about contacts. However, he asked if I could give him advice - advice on how to learn ABAP. Since there is no easy answer to this question for me, I suggested a phone call. Because of the common mother tongue, this was simply possible. We had that call today. A really nice person looking for information on how to learn ABAP. Of course you want to help
🙂
After he shared his experiences so far, I was able to make some recommendations. I also suggested that he should ask the SAP community (wisdom of the crowd): My recommendations are based on my experience. Other developers can make other recommendations that may help him a lot more.
So I hope for your support. What recommendations would you give to a beginner who wants to learn modern ABAP?
In order to stimulate the discussion, I have put together some of the topics that I find important in this context. First of all, a suggestion for the procedure (perhaps not the perfect order):
- Find a company that supports you.
- Get to know and team up with your colleagues. They should write modern ABAP.
- Take ABAP basic courses and learn the fundamentals.
- Make your first experiences in small projects. Your colleagues should support you.
- Build your skills. There is no end.
- Take on more responsibility over time.
- Share your experiences.
Here is a list of some skills that I find important. You don't have to master them all, but a good combination and an average level may be helpful. The skills that you lack yourself should be compensated by friends and colleagues. In a team you have to find the right place and bring the performance that you can contribute. Nobody is perfect
🙂
Hard skills (technologies, methods, procedures)
- programming object-oriented, than procedural (ABAP on premises and cloud)
- application design (reportings, classic dynpros, Fiori, ...)
- interface design (JSON, XML, REST, OData, IDoc, RFC ...)
- typical data structures (see DDIC)
- business process knowledge (choose your module)
- Core Data Services
- design patterns
- Clean ABAP
- ABAP Unit
- first ABAP Development Tools for Eclipse, then Workbench
- abapGit
- Unified Modeling Language
- Code Reviews
Soft skills
- analytical skills
- interest in new things
- communicative
- social
- empathic
- good writing skills
- organized
Just to name a few. As I said, in my opinion nobody can have them all.
What do you think?
Best regards, thanks for reading and
please stay healthy
Michael
