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* I learnt PHP, javascript, SQL, CSS and HTML from scratch without any help I saw a few "taught myself [such and such]" in this thread and wonders what that me

* I learnt PHP, javascript, SQL, CSS and HTML from scratch without any help I saw a few "taught myself [such and such]" in this thread and wonders what that means exactly. What do you mean by "from scratch without any help"? I wouldn't believe you didn't read anything at all about the languages because you can't just guess stuff like that :), but did you pick up a book and learn? did you read the documentation? If so, isn't that some kind of help? Basically, does "taught myself" mean "not going to a formal class"/"not having anyone teaching me in person"?

sketerpot 17y ago
> Basically, does "taught myself" mean "not going to a formal class"/"not having anyone teaching me in person"? Essentially, yes. Although, I've seen people who "learned" how to program from taking programming classes, and I'm starting to believe that, ultimately, the only way to learn to program is to learn it of your own volition, outside the context of an official class. I've seen code from grad students in computer engineering (!) which was buggy, uncommented, poorly formatted, unindented, untested, poorly designed, and sometimes meaningless. Meanwhile, people who went out and learned how to program instead of having the knowledge taught at them manage to produce much better code, consistently.
mixmax 17y ago
Sorry for not making myself clear. What I meant was without any classes, courses or people to help. Google was my best friend :-) Basically my approach was to find a project I wanted to do, then simply do it, and ask Google as I went along. There were a few problems along the way, primarily in the beginning where I didn't have a clue as to why things didn't work and didn't have sufficient knowledge to know the right search phrases. It took me a long time to find out that your indexpage has to be called index.html for instance. Later I found out that the project I was doing was actually much more complicated than first anticipated (it involved the entity-attribute-value model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model and was rather ajax heavy) and I had some problems finding out how to tweak code, use objects properly, etc. It was a great learning experience though - and maybe a good product will come out of it.

sketerpot 17y ago

> Basically, does "taught myself" mean "not going to a formal class"/"not having anyone teaching me in person"? Essentially, yes. Although, I've seen people who "learned" how to program from taking programming classes, and I'm starting to believe that, ultimately, the only way to learn to program is to learn it of your own volition, outside the context of an official class. I've seen code from grad students in computer engineering (!) which was buggy, uncommented, poorly formatted, unindented, untested, poorly designed, and sometimes meaningless. Meanwhile, people who went out and learned how to program instead of having the knowledge taught at them manage to produce much better code, consistently.

mixmax 17y ago

Sorry for not making myself clear. What I meant was without any classes, courses or people to help. Google was my best friend :-) Basically my approach was to find a project I wanted to do, then simply do it, and ask Google as I went along. There were a few problems along the way, primarily in the beginning where I didn't have a clue as to why things didn't work and didn't have sufficient knowledge to know the right search phrases. It took me a long time to find out that your indexpage has to be called index.html for instance. Later I found out that the project I was doing was actually much more complicated than first anticipated (it involved the entity-attribute-value model: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-attribute-value_model and was rather ajax heavy) and I had some problems finding out how to tweak code, use objects properly, etc. It was a great learning experience though - and maybe a good product will come out of it.