I've been doing the following for several years, and I think it's a good low commitment way of learning, i.e. there's a lot of bang for the buck. 1. Make a ~/g

I've been doing the following for several years, and I think it's a good low commitment way of learning, i.e. there's a lot of bang for the buck. 1. Make a ~/git/scratch repository. 2. Whenever you see a code snippet in an interesting blog post, don't just read it. Copy it into a subdir of ~/git/scratch and run it. Write shell scripts to automate the process of running it. Prove to yourself on your computer that it works. The first few times, it may be a little onerous. But eventually you will fall into a groove and it will take 60 seconds or less each time. I don't promise to understand it on the first pass. Just the act of downloading it and running it gets it into your brain. Half the time you end up hacking on it anyway, and other times, you don't understand it, but when you see something related later, the light bulb will go off in your head -- "that's similar to something in my ~/git/scratch repo". And then you can go from there. I don't know why but having a running code snippet really makes it feel "ready at hand" and you will learn faster. It somehow primes your subconscious. I feel like there are a lot of people who read Hacker News a bit passively, without retention. Here's a good blog post along those lines, with code: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/12/08/babys-first-garbage-collector/ http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/12/08/babys-first-gar... ----- A much bigger commitment, but with correspondingly bigger benefits: I found helpful was to reimplement like 10 different things I use in maybe 500 - 1000 lines of Python. I like the new "500 lines or less" book [1] -- I was doing this 10 years ago! Once you implement some class of program, you have a very good idea of how the "real" libraries you use are implemented. That helps you build better systems and write better code. Examples: A template language, a pattern matching language, test framework, protobuf serialization, a PEG parsing language, Unix tools like grep/sed/xargs, an event loop library based on Tornado, a package manager, static website generator and related tools, a web server, a web proxy, web framework, etc. In addition to writing something from scratch, I also find tiny code on the Internet and play around with it, like tinypy, OCamlLisp, femtolisp, xv6, etc. [1] http://aosabook.org/en/index.html http://aosabook.org/en/index.html