8 ms·
Learn X in Y Minutes
- KuiN 5y agoI attempted Advent of Code in 25 different languages last year. Learn X in Y was extremely helpful for picking up basic syntax etc. when trying to speed learn enough of a new language to get by each day. (Made it to day 16 before Christmas Crunch kicked in, but it was a great challenge)
- 3836293648 5y agoI'm doing that this year! I'm cheating a bit by putting the languages I know at the end, but it's still a really fun challenge. Doesn't really help that it's exam week though
- BossingAround 5y agoI don't get the premise. I click the C page [1]. X=c, but what is Y? If you're not going to tell me Y, then shouldn't the page be named "learn X quickly" or something similar? [1] https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/c/ https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/c/
- tedmiston 5y agoI think the site's title is just a play on words and generalization of all of the technical books with titles like Learn X in 24 Hours, Learn Y in 7 Days, Learn Z in 30 Days, etc.
- Jowsey 5y agoTo add to this, it'd be nice to have each page with multiple Ys, so you could choose how in-depth you want to go. That's a big ask, though, and it's more of a hypothetical than an actual request
- btheshoe 5y agoThis is my goto for learning any new language. Obviously better resources for each language exist individually (like beej's guide to c) but almost nowhere else on the web is there such a high density of good, solid guides
- keyle 5y agoSometimes I wonder which site has been featured on HN homepage the most, and I think this (considering exact URL matching) would be ranking pretty high! I personally never could get through these guides myself. I prefer to learn by banging at it till it work and then googling like a madman until eventually I find the most idiomatic way of doing something. Following the code smell so to speak. YMMV I'm very much a polyglot.
- jalino23 5y agoI shall learn go with this
- stavros 5y agoI'm not entirely sure, but I think I started this trend with my "learn Python in 10 minutes" tutorial back in the day.
- asicsp 5y agoPast discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Learn+X+in+Y+Minutes https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Learn+X+in+Y+Minutes
- nodicksplease 5y agobeautiful
- monetus 5y agoThis is invaluable for learning new syntax.
- stevensm 5y agoWhen I open this on my Samsung s10e and look at the page for Swift, the browser completely freezes. Does anyone else experience this?
- _mitch 5y agoSame here. On my Android phone running Chrome, that page causes the browser and system UI to hang.
- christophilus 5y agoThat’s Swift for you.
- bko 5y agoI was watching the youtube series on solving advent of code in APL and was blown away. I immediately checked this site to see if X == APL just to get a sense of what the hell is going on, but unfortunately it's not yet there yet. Anyone got a favorite obscure language they could recommend? https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=apl%20advent%20of%20code https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=apl%20advent%20...
- jjjjjjjjjjjjjjj 5y agoThanks for sharing, very interesting. I did day 2 part 1 in Befunge 93 which was pretty obscure and fun! I can definitely recommend playing around with it (even though it might not be so practical...) This is what my solution looks like (could be a lot cleaner, but first time writing Befunge!) https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj/advent-of-code-2021/main/2/1.bef93 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj/adven...
- bko 5y agoWhen i opened your link i couldn't help but chuckling. "could be a lot cleaner" Thanks for sharing
- adenozine 5y agoIo is a neat prototype-based OOP language. Made me think differently about objects. I also recommend Klong. Very different, but worth the challenge.
- DonHopkins 5y agoFORTH ?KNOW IF HONK! ELSE FORTH LEARN! THEN
- vram22 5y ago>Anyone got a favorite obscure language they could recommend? Icon by Ralph Griswold et al, at U of AZ. Some innovative language features. Pike. Supposed to be fast. Roxen web server written in Pike. ElastiC (not a typo, IIRC). Has checked these out some years ago. Donno current status. For lots more, check Wikipedia list of programming languages.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- schleck8 5y agoDon't open this site on mobile, it froze my browser thrice and I only managed to revert it to a normal state by force closing multiple times, clearing the cache and then opening a new tab from a homescreen shortcut. Never had something like this happen to me before on this device.
- johny115 5y agoAwesome! As a marketer-product-growth person, I wish projects like these were more common among marketers. With my "people" every good resource is a for profit endeavor and is paywalled lol. Does anybody possibly know some awesome resource like this but for marketing-product-growth? I was thinking about working on a something like this for growth principles and notion templates for SaaS. Just not sure the 100+ hours on that would be worth, if anyone would use it.
- christophilus 5y agoBe the change you want to see, I say.
- f0e4c2f7 5y agoI assumed this was going to be a blog post about styles of learning or something. Imagine my delight when I was greeted with this! What a cool site, thanks for creating it or sharing it if you didn't.
- DonHopkins 5y agoTeach Yourself Programming in 5,256,000 Minutes https://norvig.com/21-days.html https://norvig.com/21-days.html >Why is everyone in such a rush?
- mym1990 5y agoPeople want instant gratification and people also don’t like being bad at something for long
- strictfp 5y agoMoney problems.
- jrm4 5y agoBecause they, correctly I think, subconsciously sense that programming could and should be much easier than it presently is. The ghost of Hypercard looms.
- ff133 5y agoTbh. For me it's like a personal and professional deadline. You expect to learn/to be good at something in a short period of time, while it's expected of you to deliver good quality (consulting, product, support or whatever it may be), and this "cannot" be done unless you know your shit. Like mym1990 pointed out, no one likes to be new/bad at something, or maybe that's just me.
- ren_engineer 5y ago>why is everyone in such a rush because they aren't Ivy League educated and world renowned professors who make millions working for Google. Those books prey on desperate people looking for a chance to break into one of the few industries left that provide a decent living
- weaksauce 5y agoI mean I learned the basics of C before the internet was around from the C in 21 days books. not really a predatory book imo. it's just an intro.
- igtztorrero 5y agoExcelent
- fouadf 5y agoI once copied the following comment from another post here, I find it spot on: "I’ve a few different approaches I take depending on the task (and if I’m honest, my mood or levels of motivation): - a new programming language, especially something closer to a systems language, I have a standard set of things I’ll try to implement. Read/write a file. Turn a structured object into JSON, parse JSON to an object. Basic script that can be run from CLI, parses flags/args, reads stdin. Send a HTTP request. Implement the most basic web server."
- vram22 5y agoGUI toolkit and DB access library are two things I like to see.
- CPLX 5y agoAfter about 9 minutes I definitely still don’t understand lambda calculus at all.
- jedberg 5y agoHave you ever used Lisp or a similar functional language? Understanding those helps to understand Lambda calculus. That and an advanced Math degree. :)
- toomanydoubts 5y agoYou could try the book "Haskell programming from first principles", there's a good introduction to lambda calculus in chapter 1 or 2. Proceeding further in the Haskell-land might help even more, since Haskell is essentially typed lambda calculus.
- jrm4 5y agoGreat resource. But also, it really raises the spectre of the possibility of programming being much easier than it is; we should all collectively question why "programming" hasn't evolved past (perhaps) pointless or near-pointless differences in syntax?
- jafitc 5y agoIs it easy? Yes and no. Adding together integers is easy. Running a loop is easy. There are tremendous differences between programming technologies. Because the word “language” can distract you here. What you say in French and German and English will be pretty much the same. But many programming “languages” practically have very different runtimes, idioms, guarantees, caveats. For example in some all your data is immutable. Or take a look at the concurrency model of Elixir/Erlang/Go “processes” vs Java Threads). Erlang has a preemptive scheduler for those “processes”. Try doing that in vanilla JS. It’s not just syntax. Syntax is the surface difference but it doesn’t end there. This is not to nitpick the posted website which is a great first step but it won’t tell you the whole story. Another example is closures. Some languages don’t have them at all. Some languages allow modifying closed over variables. Some treat them as immutable constants (but still accessible to read). Those are huge semantic differences with profound implications to how you approach problems and write code. When comparing Programming technologies always think in terms of: how does it represent data, how does it move/share data between entities, how does it handle errors, what guarantees does it have. Finally an inseparable part of any programming technology is the standard library, and nowadays the whole third party ecosystem of packages. When thinking about what is different about say Python and Erlang I’d argue the least significant of that is syntax. You won’t build machine learning models in Erlang and you won’t build highly-available, fault-tolerant, billion-user chat applications in Python. And trust me not because of how the for loop looks.
- hiepph 5y agoBasically I follow this strategy: find the right language for the right task. And then I learn the language from bottom up. I immerse myself in its philosophy and its example and then I imitate that to solve my task.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Xeoncross 5y agoI always check learnxinyminutes, but it often seems to focus on syntax instead of an actual introduction to using the language. I wish there was more about memory management, macros, maybe, generics, http handlers, parallelism, errors, or whatever actually makes language X worth learning. Almost like an overviewofxinyminutes.
- Uehreka 5y agoIt’s most useful if you’ve already learned at least one language with memory management, one with garbage collection, one with static types, one with dynamic types, and maybe one weird esoteric one. Then someone throws you at a project and says “oh btw it’s in Lua” and you’re like “OK, I’ll figure out Lua’s philosophy as I go, right now I need to know how to do array literals, functions and loops so I can get some work done.” So basically, it’s best thought of as a tool to help intermediate level programmers parachute into foreign territory with some idea of where they’re going.
- Xeoncross 5y agoThat's actually my point, learnxinyminutes seems to hide the approach details in favor of just showing syntax and assuming you already know how to think in the language you're looking up. I don't care about syntax as much as I want to know how to think in this language. I'm sure my IDE will point out how to define an int32 for me.
- acbart 5y agoI wonder if anyone could actually learn the basics of Big Oh notation from this. My students struggle with the concept, and I couldn't imagine this being sufficient for helping them get a deep or even cursory understanding.
- peheje 5y agoWhat level are you teaching?
- jedberg 5y agoThe sad thing is everyone pushes so hard on understanding Big O, but yet in my 23 years of working since learning it, it's never come up beyond "you have some nested loops, that's gonna be a bad time". I'm glad it was introduced in college and that there is general awareness of it, but it seems like people stress it way too hard, especially in interviews. Like, once you write a few functions you sort of just intuitively know the O runtime of the algorithm. Once you store a few things in memory, you intuitively know the O space of the storage. And when it breaks, you look for somewhere that you introduced n^2 and fix it. Unless you're optimizing search algorithms, it almost never matters in practice. Even that double nested loop won't matter until you have a big dataset.