How to begin to teach yourself how to code, starting from scratch

http://jrheard.tumblr.com/post/421656059/you-yes-you-can-teach-yourself-how-to-program

by jrheard • 16 years ago

52 48 16 years ago

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sumeeta4• 16 years ago

How’d that work out for Reba?

And why did Reba want to learn programming in the first place?

jrheard15• 16 years ago

Hopefully it works out pretty well - I haven't heard back from her about it yet what with school and all, but hopefully she'll have some questions in a week or so, and working through them would probably be really educational for both of us.

I think she was probably interested for a couple of reasons.

* First, the house we live in has a strangely high proportion of coders, and so she hears us get really excited in our discussions about programming on a pretty regular basis. I think this is probably one of the main reasons that other people who live in the same house have, in the past, asked me the same question she did.

* Second, she thinks coding seems pretty practical; it comes up in a bunch of fields, so it's probably a pretty useful skill to have.

I think that most of the people I know either have no idea what coding is and see it as a foreign and scary thing, or, like her, they think that it must be pretty useful, and are curious about it. It'd be pretty nice if we were able to convert those in the former camp to be in the latter, but I think that what's even more important than that is that people who are already curious about programming should immediately be made aware of the fact that programming is fun as hell.

adelevie• 16 years ago

There needs to be more content geared to people who know nothing about programming. Those people have the highest hurdles to jump, as they don't even know what they don't know.

sumeeta4• 16 years ago

I couldn’t imagine jumping into programming (or even wanting to) without a problem to solve first. That’s the whole point of programming, anyway. If someone wants to learn programming, maybe we could help by directing them towards a problem they’d find interesting.

jolie• 16 years ago

What about those of us who are insatiably curious and love to learn for learning's sake?

I'd find it more frustrating than anything to be confronted with a significant problem right out of the gate.

starkfist• 16 years ago

Different strokes. I got into programming by goofing off. Sometimes I wonder about all these droids around me and all their silly "problems" they are obsessed with solving.

kentosi• 16 years ago

I have to disagree.

With my experience, the way I first got into programming was when a friend shows me visual basic many years ago when i was 12. The idea that I could actually "paint" my own application by dragging and dropping buttons, text-fields/etc fascinated me to no end.

It was this fascination of being able to create my own applications that got me stuck into it all. It was never a problem that needed solving.

steveklabnik2• 16 years ago

This is exactly the point of Hackety Hack.

I need to wrap up this OSX and Windows stuff so that I can actually promote it.

jrheard15• 16 years ago

I've never been able to successfully use Hackety Hack, as back when _why was still actively developing it and I was still on a Windows box, it would always insta-crash on my machine, but it's always sounded like a great idea, and I'm definitely looking forward to 1.0!

steveklabnik2• 16 years ago

Thanks. The cross-platform nature of shoooes is a lot of work, and it's been holding up the 1.0 release for a while.

It's looking like a Shoooes 3 release may happen soon, though, and that should help. I'll certainly let you know when it's usable.

Major_Grooves• 16 years ago

I started a little blog about trying to learn to code from scratch: http://newbiehacker.wordpress.com/ As that blog post says, it is really difficult finding resources for people who want to learn but really have no programming background whatsoever.

jrheard15• 16 years ago

That's a great blog - it's really interesting to see what the code-o-sphere looks like to a newcomer!

I saw that you were having a little trouble dealing with some of the proper-noun Concepts thrown at you in Beginning Ruby, and that you weren't entirely sure where to go next in terms of finding exercises not already in the book.

As far as the Concepts go, it's probably best to approach them all as a bunch of different ways of solving the one main problem in programming: complexity[1]. When you're coding anything longer than ten lines, you're usually tackling a problem that's too big to fit into your head all at once. So, you need to break the problem into a bunch of little chunks. Coders do this by building abstractions.

All an abstraction is is the act of deciding you've got a problem ("I need a way to print the contents of the screen!"), solving that problem (by writing code that grabs whatever's being output to the screen, translates it into something the printer can deal with, and prints it), and then hiding that solution from anyone who has that problem. The key here is that you're hiding the solution, but you do expose an interface - a "print_document" function, say - that allows them to benefit from your hard work without having to think about it[2].

That's really what nearly every programming technique is all about: minimizing complexity. So when you see big scary words like Encapsulation and Polymorphism and Mix-Ins, just remember: they're almost certainly just different ways of minimizing the amount of stuff you have to think about at any point in time, and if they're any good at letting you do that, they're probably worth learning about.

Oh! And as far as finding fun exercises to work on goes: Try writing something that'll automate a chore in your daily life. Say, an automated grocery list, or a "books to read" list, or an apocalypse-detector that checks every five minutes to see if Google's down. You know what they say about the sky and the limit and all that :)

[1] “Managing complexity is the most important technical topic in software development. In my view, it’s so important that Software’s Primary Technical Imperative has to be managing complexity" - Steve McConnell, Code Complete

[2] "Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them" - Alfred North Whitehead

malte• 16 years ago

I'm in the very exact situation like you. I also do not have a programming background and started to learn to program (Ruby) last fall. "Learn to Program" was also my starting point. Like you said in your blog, it is a decent book, but didn't get me very far. Being involved in a Rails project, the ultimate goal is to master Rails in a way that I can work on small features for our project. Right now, I'm kind of cross-reading "Heads First Rails" and "Beginning Ruby". "_why's poignant guide to Ruby" is also on my reading list, but more because of my fascination for _why.

One advice (from beginner to beginner) is to find yourself a good mentor. I've got to know a Rails programmer and he is helping me to get into Rails and giving me advice on good ways to work (using the command line etc) and how to solve problems in Rails.

meox• 16 years ago

I am trying to learn; currently reading how to think like a computer scientist on Green Tea Press.

jrheard15• 16 years ago

Best of luck! Sounds like a pretty good idea, actually - I just grabbed the .pdf for the manuscript of the Python version of the book from http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html and sent it off to my Kindle for a rainy day.

jsz02• 16 years ago

As someone who's never really been able to break into coding my biggest problem with most of the learning material is it does not tackle a broader perspective on problem solving. Learning syntax and libraries is easy. Knowing where to apply them and how to architect your program is the really hard part. I'm not sure how you learn that other than experience and for a novice that means countless hours of work before they can produce anything unique and useful.

jrheard15• 16 years ago

Unfortunately, that does seem to be the case at this point, although if anyone has any good references for novices, I'd certainly love to see them. So far, the best I've ever seen the situation summed up has been in the top comment on http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=90782 .

andrewcooke2• 16 years ago

have you tried "how to design programs"? http://www.htdp.org/

i haven't used it, but i think it's aimed at this kind of problem (where to apply them and how to architect your program).

el_dot• 16 years ago

I would also suggest Introduction to Computer Science and Programming from OpenCourseWare: http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...

It's the right approach, they teach you the concepts so that you can pick up any language and run with it. It uses Python but it's not about Python, which is a clean language that has a great support system (perhaps the most essential part in learning how to code).

jsz02• 16 years ago

Thanks I'll check both of these links out. I'm designing a little Google Maps based web app that has already had two major architectural changes due to issues I hadn't considered. Before I go forward with it I want to go through these resources and try to get the third iteration right.

yashodhan3• 16 years ago

Should I learn PHP or Ruby?

jrheard15• 16 years ago

Just like everything else, the decision's based on nothing but trade-offs. Here's my analysis.

If you learn PHP:

* You'll be able to see results running in your Web browser a lot quicker

* Your knowledge will be really relevant if you're looking to work on slightly older, more established Web sites like Facebook or Yahoo!, but

* You probably won't learn very good programming practices on your own - PHP has been pretty notorious for this, but maybe this has changed with PHP5, I haven't been keeping up.

If you learn Ruby:

* First you'll have to learn the language, and then you'll basically have to learn a framework like Sinatra or Rails before you'll be able to do awesome Web things

* Your knowledge will be really relevant to most startup-style Web sites begun since 2005 or so (e.g. Yelp, which is written in Python, which is basically sort of like a sister language to Ruby, give or take)

* You'll be much more likely to learn a lot of really good programming practices as you go that will serve you throughout your career.

Having worked with both PHP and Ruby, I'd recommend Ruby, because I think it's easier to learn, it's more fun, and it's a better investment; I'm pretty sure most HNers would agree if given the choice between those two languages, but your sample of respondents is probably pretty biased :)

yashodhan3• 16 years ago

Thanks for the response. I'd prefer to learn Ruby over PHP but I'm hesitant because it seems like PHP has a larger audience / more documentation that would help me in my quest to create web apps.

Googling for help with errors in PHP would be easier I imagine, seeing as more people know PHP. Also, there are a lot of existing PHP scripts that I could build off of.

Those are my concerns.

quizbiz• 16 years ago

Then how should I get started with Ruby?

rick8882• 16 years ago

"Your knowledge will be really relevant if you're looking to work on slightly older, more established Web sites like Facebook or Yahoo!"

Many newer sites are using PHP as well. PHP is used on established sites, but that just means that it's a proven concept. I also see many more jobs for php developers than Ruby (I have seen a few startups using ruby).

"You probably won't learn very good programming practices on your own - PHP has been pretty notorious for this, but maybe this has changed with PHP5, I haven't been keeping up."

I suppose this is true. But I think you can pickup good programming practices in any language.

Another reason to learn php is because it uses a C-style syntax, which will make it much easier to transition to other languages like c/c++/javascript/c#/Java.

Ruby uses a syntax all its own that you can pretty much only use in Ruby.

I also don't feel people should be learning a programming language through frameworks. It's like learning how to add and subtract using a calculator.

What beginners need to learn is programming concepts that they can use in any language.

samois98• 16 years ago

So I hear about scripts in web-based contexts, but also in get-repetitive-shit-done-on-my-computer contexts. What's good for that, and what would work on Windows machines?

sbhat7• 16 years ago

Python.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...

Tichy• 16 years ago

JavaScript

zavulon• 16 years ago

Usually "I stopped reading after..." is used as a metaphor, and the article still gets read.

In this case though, I really did stop reading after "as a matter of fact, any self-respecting programmer you’ve ever met is mostly self-taught."

jrheard15• 16 years ago

Why?

Confusion• 16 years ago

I really don't think you should advise someone to read "_why's poignant guide to ruby" as an introductory text. The sillyness is very distracting, the humor doesn't suit everyone, it's not very well structured and the information density is quite low. I feel there's a ready chance it will be demotivating. I definitely didn't consider it a decent introduction to Ruby or programming. </heresy>

jrheard15• 16 years ago

Much as I love _why's works, you may have a point - I've been reading through http://pine.fm/LearnToProgram/ on the suggestion of a couple commenters on the post, and I'm pretty impressed so far. I'm going to forward it along to the friend whose question spawned the post.

How to begin to teach yourself how to code, starting from scratch

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