3 ms·

How to Start Learning Computer Programming

26 points by Gennavfo 14y ago

tweiss 14y ago
It's amazing to see how little has changed over the last five years - the blog post is from 2008. I mean you would obviously pick Python or Ruby now, and use websites like Codecademy or Udacity. But the core message still applies: it's hard to learn to program and you will have to spend a lot of time on it. There are still no free rides. Makes be feel better about the long hours I've spent to learn to code.
craftman 14y ago
This is not about starting to learn computer programming, this is about starting to learn to get a "middle" job of programmer as proposed by persons who do not program themselves. If you REALLY want to start learn computer programming look at Lisp or Smalltalk.
tragomaskhalos 14y ago
Hmmm - advice for beginners that does not mention Python or Ruby but rather headlines with C++ (admittedly caveated)? Sorry, cannot endorse.
- wyclif 14y ago
  It was written in 2008, so it's dated. But in point of fact, it does mention Python as an interpreted language. Of far more concern than the datedness of it are the grammatical errors; this is a 5 year old blog post, so you'd think he'd have either noticed by now or a reader would have pointed them out (please, programmers— is it really so hard to learn the "its-it's" rule?). Now that's something that could have been done better.
jamin 14y ago
To me this doesn't focus enough on why you should choose one language over the other. They all have their place depending on the type of applications you are going to be building.
rahulroy 14y ago
If you are going to use W3Schools, you're gonna have a bad time. http://w3fools.com/ http://w3fools.com/
- Kiro 14y ago
  The author mentions W3Schools in a footnote and you feel you have to refer to W3Fools. Give him a break. FWIW I think the W3Schools PHP tutorial is one of the best out there. Straight to the point.
  - greyfade 14y ago
    If it's one of the best, that doesn't say much about what's out there. Giving students the wrong information (as w3schools frequently does) is worse than giving them no information at all. To say it's "one of the best" implies that the bar is set pretty damn low.
    - Kiro 14y ago
      I just read through the list at W3Fools and the things they bring up are either already changed at W3Scools or something really minor they're nitpicking about. No information is not better than information with minor flaws. I still believe it's a good resource which goes straight to the point. When I google something I want a straight-foward answer and not a complicated specification like the one at MDN or W3.org.
      - greyfade 14y ago
        When I google something, I want information that won't leave me running in circles while I figure out why it's not doing what the docs say it's supposed to do. I've had that happen with w3schools more often than any other resource. It's a waste of my time, and I get better, clearer, and more accurate information from MDN and the W3C, so I've stopped googling such things and just go to the horse's mouth.
  - rahulroy 14y ago
    |I think the W3Schools PHP tutorial is one of the best out there. Just go to W3fools http://w3fools.com/ http://w3fools.com/ and search for PHP, I'm sure you will be able to find few mistakes or bad programming practices.
tluyben2 14y ago
I think he is mixing 'valuable/marketable skill' and 'programming' with his 90s comparison; it wasn't hard to learn programming in the 90s. It wasn't even hard in (most of) the 80s. There were BBSs which contained a wealth of information, there were tons of (disk based) magazines and there were free tools. Most likely you wouldn't be learning something marketable perse, however you would learn programming in the same time as you do now. Actually I think maybe even more efficient as there weren't the HN post distractions :) Your computer would most likely not be connected (all the time) and multitasking wasn't very nicely implemented or even possible, so your computer meant either running games/software made by others or full focus on tinkering with Basic, assembly or some of the other languages out there at the time.
marklit 14y ago
The author of this probably grew up in an environment simular to mine in the 1990s. Among my peers and teachers, everything revolved around Microsoft. C$650 for Visual Basic Pro, Windows NT was the special platform that business used, 'real' databases cost a lot of money. I really wish I could go back to those times and give the open source world more thought and attention. Free compilers, free databases and looking back at it, PERL would have been a lot more useful than Visual Basic. I spent years developing OpenGL applications on WindowsNT. I wasn't very good at what I did and the market for my skills wasn't very broad. Had I built a basic web app using HTML, Postgres and PERL I could have avoided a lot of time spent in jobs I did not enjoy very much. In the summer of 2002 I was trying to focus on building my skills in C++ and OpenGL to a commercial-ready level. As a fun side project I built a mock airline ticket booking system in PHP. The side project got my a job in Germany and the rest is history. Some languages and tools are more marketable than others.
michaelochurch 14y ago
If you want to do serious commercial development, you’ll have to spend a considerable amount of money on a really good suite of tools to do so, that much hasn’t changed. Lolwut? Am I about to go to jail for failing to pay my emacs fee?
- jdiez17 14y ago
  Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I got a fishy feeling from reading that post. It's like it's written to not mean much, but get money from ad impressions. I didn't like the post in general, nor the title. I don't think he makes very good points, except the variable/conditional/etc thing.
- udp 14y ago
  This is very Microsoft-orientated. Even the open source software he recommends is Windows-only (Dev-C++, Notepad++).
  - greyfade 14y ago
    ... And obsolete. Bloodshed Dev-C++ hasn't seen one whit of activity in nearly 8 years (4 years at the time of the article's writing). I can't comprehend why people keep recommending it to anyone.
pubby 14y ago
This article sounds like something a non-programmer would write for a research project. There's lots of little mistakes throughout, such as imprecise definitions for compiled/interpreted/VMs and calling DevC++ a compiler, but beginners wouldn't know the difference anyway. The real problem is that there's just flat-out bad advice! Many of the links he posts are just the first search result you'll find on Google, yet are terrible resources. In particular, cplusplus.com, w3schools, DevC++, and cprogramming.com are things you'll hear experts warn about for being outdated, having misinformation, or just poor explanation.
neumann_alfred 14y ago
Surely there's something here for everyone: http://programming-motherfucker.com/become.html http://programming-motherfucker.com/become.html
- dkd 14y ago
  is that site owned by zed shaw?
venomsnake 14y ago
Find something cool you want to do with computer. Find a way to do it. At the end you have learned a great deal of IT skills and the universe is a better place :)
kunai 14y ago
I stopped taking this article seriously at "If you want to do serious commercial development, you’ll have to spend a considerable amount of money on a really good suite of tools to do so". The author must be still stuck in the 90s. With mobile app development rapidly reaching its peak, software is a gold mine, and it costs very little to be able to earn some extra cash off of app development. Also, I didn't like how the author recommended Visual Studio. Visual Studio is a closed-source, slow, resource-heavy piece of software that ONLY works on Windows. Windows is not a very good development platform, and I'm surprised that the article didn't mention any software for BSD or GNU/Linux (Geany?), or any mention about standalone compilers like gcc. He just jumps straight into the IDE portion without properly explaining how to use a compiler. This is a decent article for anyone wishing to dip their toes into the world of programming, but for beginners, I'd recommend a good Sams Teach Yourself book instead.

26 points by Gennavfo 14y ago

It's amazing to see how little has changed over the last five years - the blog post is from 2008. I mean you would obviously pick Python or Ruby now, and use websites like Codecademy or Udacity. But the core message still applies: it's hard to learn to program and you will have to spend a lot of time on it. There are still no free rides. Makes be feel better about the long hours I've spent to learn to code.

craftman 14y ago

This is not about starting to learn computer programming, this is about starting to learn to get a "middle" job of programmer as proposed by persons who do not program themselves. If you REALLY want to start learn computer programming look at Lisp or Smalltalk.

tragomaskhalos 14y ago

Hmmm - advice for beginners that does not mention Python or Ruby but rather headlines with C++ (admittedly caveated)? Sorry, cannot endorse.

wyclif 14y ago
It was written in 2008, so it's dated. But in point of fact, it does mention Python as an interpreted language. Of far more concern than the datedness of it are the grammatical errors; this is a 5 year old blog post, so you'd think he'd have either noticed by now or a reader would have pointed them out (please, programmers— is it really so hard to learn the "its-it's" rule?). Now that's something that could have been done better.

jamin 14y ago

To me this doesn't focus enough on why you should choose one language over the other. They all have their place depending on the type of applications you are going to be building.

rahulroy 14y ago

If you are going to use W3Schools, you're gonna have a bad time. http://w3fools.com/ http://w3fools.com/

Kiro 14y ago
The author mentions W3Schools in a footnote and you feel you have to refer to W3Fools. Give him a break. FWIW I think the W3Schools PHP tutorial is one of the best out there. Straight to the point.
- greyfade 14y ago
  If it's one of the best, that doesn't say much about what's out there. Giving students the wrong information (as w3schools frequently does) is worse than giving them no information at all. To say it's "one of the best" implies that the bar is set pretty damn low.
  - Kiro 14y ago
    I just read through the list at W3Fools and the things they bring up are either already changed at W3Scools or something really minor they're nitpicking about. No information is not better than information with minor flaws. I still believe it's a good resource which goes straight to the point. When I google something I want a straight-foward answer and not a complicated specification like the one at MDN or W3.org.
    - greyfade 14y ago
      When I google something, I want information that won't leave me running in circles while I figure out why it's not doing what the docs say it's supposed to do. I've had that happen with w3schools more often than any other resource. It's a waste of my time, and I get better, clearer, and more accurate information from MDN and the W3C, so I've stopped googling such things and just go to the horse's mouth.
- rahulroy 14y ago
  |I think the W3Schools PHP tutorial is one of the best out there. Just go to W3fools http://w3fools.com/ http://w3fools.com/ and search for PHP, I'm sure you will be able to find few mistakes or bad programming practices.

tluyben2 14y ago

I think he is mixing 'valuable/marketable skill' and 'programming' with his 90s comparison; it wasn't hard to learn programming in the 90s. It wasn't even hard in (most of) the 80s. There were BBSs which contained a wealth of information, there were tons of (disk based) magazines and there were free tools. Most likely you wouldn't be learning something marketable perse, however you would learn programming in the same time as you do now. Actually I think maybe even more efficient as there weren't the HN post distractions :) Your computer would most likely not be connected (all the time) and multitasking wasn't very nicely implemented or even possible, so your computer meant either running games/software made by others or full focus on tinkering with Basic, assembly or some of the other languages out there at the time.

marklit 14y ago

The author of this probably grew up in an environment simular to mine in the 1990s. Among my peers and teachers, everything revolved around Microsoft. C$650 for Visual Basic Pro, Windows NT was the special platform that business used, 'real' databases cost a lot of money. I really wish I could go back to those times and give the open source world more thought and attention. Free compilers, free databases and looking back at it, PERL would have been a lot more useful than Visual Basic. I spent years developing OpenGL applications on WindowsNT. I wasn't very good at what I did and the market for my skills wasn't very broad. Had I built a basic web app using HTML, Postgres and PERL I could have avoided a lot of time spent in jobs I did not enjoy very much. In the summer of 2002 I was trying to focus on building my skills in C++ and OpenGL to a commercial-ready level. As a fun side project I built a mock airline ticket booking system in PHP. The side project got my a job in Germany and the rest is history. Some languages and tools are more marketable than others.

michaelochurch 14y ago

If you want to do serious commercial development, you’ll have to spend a considerable amount of money on a really good suite of tools to do so, that much hasn’t changed. Lolwut? Am I about to go to jail for failing to pay my emacs fee?

jdiez17 14y ago
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. I got a fishy feeling from reading that post. It's like it's written to not mean much, but get money from ad impressions. I didn't like the post in general, nor the title. I don't think he makes very good points, except the variable/conditional/etc thing.
udp 14y ago
This is very Microsoft-orientated. Even the open source software he recommends is Windows-only (Dev-C++, Notepad++).
- greyfade 14y ago
  ... And obsolete. Bloodshed Dev-C++ hasn't seen one whit of activity in nearly 8 years (4 years at the time of the article's writing). I can't comprehend why people keep recommending it to anyone.

pubby 14y ago

This article sounds like something a non-programmer would write for a research project. There's lots of little mistakes throughout, such as imprecise definitions for compiled/interpreted/VMs and calling DevC++ a compiler, but beginners wouldn't know the difference anyway. The real problem is that there's just flat-out bad advice! Many of the links he posts are just the first search result you'll find on Google, yet are terrible resources. In particular, cplusplus.com, w3schools, DevC++, and cprogramming.com are things you'll hear experts warn about for being outdated, having misinformation, or just poor explanation.

neumann_alfred 14y ago

Surely there's something here for everyone: http://programming-motherfucker.com/become.html http://programming-motherfucker.com/become.html

dkd 14y ago
is that site owned by zed shaw?

venomsnake 14y ago

Find something cool you want to do with computer. Find a way to do it. At the end you have learned a great deal of IT skills and the universe is a better place :)

kunai 14y ago

I stopped taking this article seriously at "If you want to do serious commercial development, you’ll have to spend a considerable amount of money on a really good suite of tools to do so". The author must be still stuck in the 90s. With mobile app development rapidly reaching its peak, software is a gold mine, and it costs very little to be able to earn some extra cash off of app development. Also, I didn't like how the author recommended Visual Studio. Visual Studio is a closed-source, slow, resource-heavy piece of software that ONLY works on Windows. Windows is not a very good development platform, and I'm surprised that the article didn't mention any software for BSD or GNU/Linux (Geany?), or any mention about standalone compilers like gcc. He just jumps straight into the IDE portion without properly explaining how to use a compiler. This is a decent article for anyone wishing to dip their toes into the world of programming, but for beginners, I'd recommend a good Sams Teach Yourself book instead.