OK. It’s time.

Time to tackle one of the questions that we get most frequently, and one of the things that many affiliates fear, struggle with, or just plain avoid like hell.

How to learn to program.

This is the first in a series of tutorials that will teach you the basics of programming in Javascript. You won’t be ready to code the next Call Of Duty, but you’ll know some tricks that will serve you for your entire career as an affiliate, or indeed any other computer-based career!

In this first tutorial, I’m going to take you through a very common and very useful bit of coding: how to show the operating system, country, phone model or anything else that your visitor is using. We’re going to do that by forwarding the information our tracker detects on to our landing page, then using code on our landing page to customise it for each visitor. This is a pretty reliable way of boosting engagement with your landers.

But rather than just dumping a pile of code on you and saying “copy-paste that!” I’m going to go through it and explain what it does, and how you’d modify it if you need to.

Why Should You Learn To Program?

But why? It’s easy to outsource to programmers on oDesk – why learn it yourself?

Firstly, a lot of simple programming tasks are quicker to do than they are to outsource. The one we’re working on in this tutorial is one of them: it’ll take you about the same amount of time to describe the task, post an ad, and select a programmer as it will to follow through this tutorial yourself. Even if you’re not planning to learn complex tasks, knowing enough to be able to drop in and modify simple “recipes” will actually save you time over outsourcing those same recipes.

Having a basic knowledge of coding will also give you the ability to make minor changes to scripts you have already outsourced, even if those scripts ar ...

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