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> its still my contention that the best method by which to learn any language is the "There ain't nothin' to it but to do it" method. Absolutely true, but you
by cruise02 17y ago
> its still my contention that the best method by which to learn any language is the "There ain't nothin' to it but to do it" method.
Absolutely true, but you still need something to read to introduce you to the basic syntax and the general concepts of the language. Having a bridge between a known language and a new language can significantly speed this phase up, and get you quickly to the point where you're able to start experimenting.
- jordyhoyt 17y agoRight. I briefly used R for research while I was in school. It was definitely a valuable tool for generating sets of random numbers, doing some statistical operations on them (PCA and SVD if you must know), and outputting them to a file that I could then pipe to my C program. It was a good example of doing one thing and doing it [pretty] well. That said, I only learned enough of R to get it to do what I wanted. The help in the interactive mode was all I really had to go off of then, and that was very helpful with plenty of examples. Being a relatively uncommon, single-letter language name, google wasn't giving me anything useful at the time. I see that is now much improved now, but this tutorial - mapping it to other languages and explaining syntax gotchas - would have saved me several hours of ramp-up for the simple tasks I wanted to accomplish.