Ask HN - what is the best method to learn how to code?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1969970

by pennyfiller • 16 years ago

10 8 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm a business guy but I want to learn how to code as a frontend developer.

Which method is more effective?

1. Should I learn by doing? I have a website and want to improve it. Will I be able to teach myself by trying to fix features?

2. I pick up books and start from scratch? And only then, after reading the material I will be ready to make something happen?

Please advise. Thanks!

gdl• 16 years ago

It depends on your goals and learning style. If you're just looking to be able to tinker a little bit with existing code, or learn best by doing, then jumping right in is probably the way to go. If you want a deeper understanding, and to avoid making as many beginner mistakes and poor decisions, books are a great way to pick up "best practices" without wasting time going through all of the worst practices first. But lots of people have found success with each approach so if one way fits your learning style better, by all means go with that one.

And really, the most effective route is to do both. Focusing too much on doing without the book knowledge results in creating terribly awkward solutions to problems that have been already been solved. On the other hand It's easy to follow along with a book and fool yourself into thinking that everything makes sense while lacking the experience needed to figure out how to put all the little pieces together to create something useful. As is usual in life, balance is key.

zootar• 16 years ago

New to programming, you should probably get a book, start reading it at the beginning, and do some of the exercises. As soon as you think you understand how to do something, try it on your website. Pretty soon, you'll find you know enough to learn by doing, reading tutorials, etc.

What you want to avoid, whether you choose method 1 or 2, is the idea that you can write your first lines of code as a useful part of a real project. To learn effectively, you have to be willing to implement some examples, experiment, and throw some code away.

eswat• 16 years ago

Both? Many books have coding exercises in them and I find it very difficult personally to retain all the knowledge I’ve glanced over in a book and be able to apply that in execution without having done any coding in-between.

dpio• 16 years ago

It's a constant cycle of learning and applying. You can't retain the knowledge without actually doing the coding. I'd say, read enough to know the basics (maybe chapters 1-2?) and then jump into your IDE and code away, then when you hit the knowledge wall go back to the books and continue the cycle. I guess my main point is that 1 and 2 go hand-in-hand. hope this helps!

clyfe• 16 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean by "frontend" so I'll make a wild guess.

Start with some lightweight tutorials about creating web pages (static content): http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

Creating dynamic content (programming) is a whole different issue ( http://norvig.com/21-days.html ).

Start with learning procedural programming: http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkCSpy/html/

And then experiment with a simple web framework: http://webpy.org/tutorial3.en

The learn workflow shold be a combineation of: read some -> do some -> try some -> read some more -> experiment some -> read some -> continue

This is just a startingpoint, there are many topics to web development, from javascript for interface interactivity to distributed systems, message queues, scaling ( I'll write this link again just for kiks http://norvig.com/21-days.html ) etc.,

The resources are for the Python language, personally I prefer Ruby, but the resources for "learn programming" are more evolved in Python as it has bean adopted as a teaching language by many schools/universities.

PS. Exercise oriented: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

pennyfiller• 16 years ago

wow! this is really helpful!

hasenj• 16 years ago

A combination of both.

When you try to do something, you'll always find yourself stuck in the middle, and that's when you'll google stuff.

And then you'll find tutorials, or blog posts, or what have you. And as you read more of those, you'll see references to books and other tutorials/posts/essays.

Start by just doing, and you'll eventually end up reading a lot.

drallison• 16 years ago

It's complicated. The art includes much more than just "leaning to code"--design, algorithms, analysis, testing, interaction styles, psychology, and more. I believe the best approach is an apprenticeship. Find someone who is an expert and work with her/him on several complex projects.

Ask HN - what is the best method to learn how to code?

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