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> Coding is best learned "the hard way". Funny. There is a series of books by Zed shaw called "Learn 'x' the Hard Way". The books tells you to type things fi
by rauljara 15y ago
> Coding is best learned "the hard way".
Funny. There is a series of books by Zed shaw called "Learn 'x' the Hard Way". The books tells you to type things first; the explanation comes later.
In my experience, the most important part of learning to program is that you can do something fun, quickly. If you enjoy the programming, you will continue with it, and then bother to learn the "why"'s. If you don't find it fun, why would you bother learning "why"?
The Code Academy tutorial isn't perfect, but I do think it's a fun introduction. Importantly, it's a fun introduction that require almost no set up. I know it has limitations, but it is pretty awesome, and a much better path into Ruby than a lecture on object oriented programming.
Not to knock the lecture. It's very important, in fact. I just think the lecture should wait until lesson 2 or 3.
- SatvikBeri 15y agoI agree. The vast majority of what I've read regarding teaching, and my personal experiments tutoring, have shown that alternating between different layers of abstraction is a far better approach than going purely bottom-up. One example is the popularity of Stanford Professor Andrew Ng's Machine Learning class. The course is almost entirely top-down, with concepts, then trying out basic code, then finally learning some of the Math behind the algorithms. But people have definitely been able to learn from the course-I remember seeing an HN post about a guy who built a self-driving RC car using the algorithms in the ML course.