Do you have problems breaking down large programming tasks into something you can work with? A few simple tricks will help you get going.

1. Read over your programming task. You will want to be familiar with what you are being asked to do. In particular look for things that are required as input or output from your code.

2. In the compiler/editor of your choice write out an outline of what your programming task is to accomplish using comment lines (to avoid syntax errors). I find that bullet points are all I need here. Ex: Open text file, read setting on line 3, etc.

3. Now re-read your outline and compare it to the programming task you have been asked to do. Does it meet the requirements? Have you left anything out? If you are satisfied with the outline proceed to the next step.

4. Look at your outline. Are the items in your outline still pretty vague or general ( Open file could mean several things) Take this time to break down the items in your outline, so Open file would become: Select existing text file, open text file for reading. The goal here is to have one line in your outline for each action the code should do.

5. Take a look at the outline to see if there are multiple lines doing the same thing. These are good candidates for functions in object-oriented languages.

6. Finally, for each line of comment in your outline, write the code underneath it to actually do what your comment says. This way you can tackle any problem and have the comments to tell you what it's doing ahead of time!