Personal Insights
ABAP starter
Dear community, last week I welcomed the new apprentices and students to my company. That was great. It’s nice to meet interested and motivated people – regardless of whether they are at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of their working life.
Some of them will also work with ABAP, all of them will definitely learn to work with a SAP ERP system. In our company there are introductory events and plans for what they should learn. So everything is well organized. Still, I’ll do my best to make new SAP fans out of them 🙂
However, I also keep getting questions from students at the university of applied sciences and from personal contacts. It’s about what you work as an ABAP developer, how you get into this job, what is good and what is bad. I am happy to answer such questions and try to support people (see this blog).
In my opinion, there has been so much interesting new software from SAP in the past few years. So it’s important that there are newcomers in the SAP ecosystem – whoever wants to inherit something must have heirs 🙂 Otherwise we won’t be able to use all the nice new things because there aren’t enough professionals. Especially professionals who work together. By the way: We don’t get the old, existing things maintained either.
Therefore I set up a central hub called “ABAP starter” on GitHub. There I and hopefully the entire SAP community try to help beginners with very basic information. Hopefully then the start into the ABAP development life will be a little easier 🙂
One more note: Some people believe that sharing knowledge isn’t a good thing. You would create competition for yourself on the job market. I cannot confirm because I wouldn’t write these lines if other people had not shared their knowledge with me. On the contrary: I’ve learned that sharing knowledge leads to more opportunities, interesting contacts, new perspectives, new possibilities and many more. Sharing something can also make a person happier 😉
Best regards, thanks for reading and please stay healthy
Michael
P.S.: Please support the virtual wishing well.
P.S.S.: Not tired of reading blogs? Check this blog by arghadip kar.
Thanks Michael Keller for the mention of the Blog.
Cheers
Arghadip
Thanks go to you. You share your knowledge and experience. That's great! 🙂
Hi Michael,
Thanks for your wonderful blog. Even after working for many years with ABAP this blog gave me an opportunity to revisit some of the things and refresh my basic knowledge in ABAP. Your well documented path of the list of hard and soft skills sums up all the essential ingredients one needs to kick start their journey. It's a very nice ABAP road map for the everyone... both for the newbie and for a professional.
Thanks for a wonderful blog and hope to see many more detailed blogs from you.
Just a request... it would be great if you can provide a road map for the first hard skill - Object Oriented Programming. It's a beast and will definitely will take a lot of time and experience for anyone to conquer. So, any advice will be of great help.
Thanks a lot.
Best Regards,
Samantak.
Hi Samantak,
the idea of the skills/talents tree came from video games but it perfectly fits for me in this combination. People in IT love trees 🙂 I will also add more details (nodes, leafes) to the tree, especially in the area of "object oriented programming". That could take a little while. Stay tuned.
Best regards,
Michael
This is interesting to me. I forgot how much we should know to program in "just" ABAP. The one thing that stands out is the OOP. (Hint: Thomas Jung has some great Youtube videos. I haven't re-watched them. But I'm thinking they are still relevant)
So is it object oriented programming we should know or is it ABAP Core Data Services? I guess it depends on the version you are on. Lately I've been trying to move more towards CDS because of the re-usability in Fiori. If I was new to ABAP programming - would I want to learn the "newer" way of doing things or the "older" way. Just a philosophical question. And it does depend on the version. Object Orientated programming is really always good to know. (Not just in ABAP)
True. But to only work with new technologies would be a really strange limitation of your job and potential employers because the world is full of legacy code 🙂
Hi Michael,
thanks for the blog post and the Git, especially with reference to your last blog post "advice for a beginner". I'm really looking forward to the tree growing 🙂
I'll definitely also have a look into "Get Started with ABAP Development", maybe there's something new to me as an "advanced beginner".
Thanks and regards
Andreas
This is such a great idea from your side Michael!
Thanks for sharing.
I'm happy if you like the idea 🙂
Michael, Thanks for sharing. IF I am available , I will translate your passage into Chinese.
Because your passage is so wonderful.
That sounds great and a lot of work to do. Thanks in advance for all your effort and support!
I've always made it a principle of my career (which started in 1990) to share information and knowledge. I've not run out of work yet!
When I was a manager, I actively worked to remove people who had made themselves "indispensible".
Have to say I'm mildly disappointed that this is about ABAP beginners, I was hoping it's an ABAP equivalent of the sourdough starter. 🙂
Thank you for promoting our book! Just want to note that the ABAP examples from the book are also available on Github: https://github.com/Boneill3/IntroToABAP
Thanks for using " sourdough starter". Learned something 🙂
Well, to learn more, see here or probably here. 🙂
By the way, seeing your unofficial "ABAP starter" tag made me think if there should be an official "ABAP beginner" tag on SCN? I think it could encourage the beginners to ask the questions more freely. And others could chose whether to answer questions in that tag or stay away from it. 🙂 Just a thought.
Anything that helps should be done. Isn't it worth a try?