As a marketer who has been trying for some time now (I'm too embarrassed to admit how long) to learn how to code, I've heard this advice a lot. Here is my issue with it.
Everyone says, "Just pick something you want to build, and learn how to build it." I don't know what I want to build, because I don't know what I can build. That's like taking someone who says "I want to learn calculus" and saying "Well just think of a problem you want to solve."
For beginning programs, there are two classifications that I remember being taught way back when. First, there were the class of problems that can be summed up by "Write a program to generate a sequence of Fibonacci numbers". These were all algorithmic / somewhat math based problems. They usually came from classes that were sponsored by the Engineering side of the school. The second classification can be summed up by "You have two files, each containing a list of [data items]. Produce a program that generates a third list of [data items] [having a given characteristic]". These seamed to me to be more practical / instructive.
So as a marketing person, think of some types of reports you would like to see given some data that you have. Remember that the input data should consist of a number of items (records or lines) that have consistent characteristics, somewhat like you would get from a spreadsheet. Maybe you want to get a list of how many customers from each zip code bought a blue widget vs. a green widget. So in this case you would write down a mock up of what your resulting report would look like, then figure out what manual steps you would do to get there.
When going through this exercise manually, pretend that you can't remember anything but your current thought, and that you have to write down everything else. Each thing you write down on paper translates to a program variable. Then, every time you have to change what is written down, make sure that is done via a repeatable list of steps. That then translates into an algorithm, which directly translates into lines of code.
Most of the first programs I had to do in "the real world" consisted of simply taking data from multiple sources, and making reports that others in the business could analyze. In some cases it was simple compound interest reports based on employee deposits/withdraws in a company savings account (kind of like an in-house mini credit union). Other times it was something like an Inventory Turns report for our head of purchasing (a report of how many times each product would completely cycle in inventory in a given month). These were all done on a Unix command line, using a combination of shell scripts, sort, join, uniq, and awk (this was well before perl came out). Eventually this type of work became second nature (so i didn't have to think through the logic), and I was able to move on to more advanced programming.
I agree. I think it's a lot easier to get started if you have SOME idea of what you want to accomplish or what direction you want to go in. And who couldn't use a good to-do list?
I'm one of those people who have been trying to learn how to code, and I did start out using Codecademy. I quickly figured out what you're saying here: it kind of sucks. It was helpful for making me think about things with a programmer mindset and also helped teach me syntax, but I completed the entire JavaScript and Python tracks without any clue how to go on to make my own project. Also, it had so many bugs that half the time I ended up checking the Q&A section and just copy/pasting code that worked.
On the contrary, I'm now doing One Month Rails, a $20 course from Skillshare. The very first lesson taught me how to set up Git, get Ruby & Rails all set up on my machine, created a new project, and deployed it to Heroku. This was already a world more helpful than the Codecademy lessons. (I'm blogging about it here in case anyone is interested: https://cuppycode.wordpress.com/ )
Next I'm going to go through the Rails 3 Tutorial. If there are things like this (project focused, help you set up the dev environment) for Python, could anyone recommend?
Rails Tutorial (http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book) teaches you to do all those things and more. More importantly it is absolutely free. I'm just pointing it out as I wasn't sure whether you were referring to another book when you mentioned "Rails 3 Tutorial" as your next step.
Hartl's book is awesome, but a LOT of new information thrown at you at once, and very opinionated. Still a great resource, though - especially for the low, low cost of free.
As someone who went from design (Photoshop) to frontend (HTML, CSS, JS) to backend (Ruby), I can totally vouch for ditching the 'one-stop-shop' sites that claim to be able to teach you everything about programming. In my experience, the most important thing to do is fork, break, and fix. Only if you immerse yourself in programming are you able to understand and start applying the concepts.
Also, I think a huge skill for any programmer is being able to search and find answers quickly and efficiently. It sounds silly, but being able to quickly Google search for a particular answer or abstract a StackOverflow question to apply to your situation is huge when getting started because those are the resources you come to use all the time when you're actually building a product.
Not sure how I feel about (1) since that's the maximum most people can afford to put in (they have to pay rent, etc) and I'm ambivalent about telling them "your max effort isn't enough. You have to go all in". I agree with the premise but I'm really not sure how practical it is in practice.
I strongly disagree with
1) Nights, weekends are bad
too.
Actually, I think that sometimes it is the best time to learn new skills or master old ones. And, arguably, it is the way how most of people start their adventure with coding (and probably most of good programmers).
The thing is how _serious_ you can be. If "nights and weekends" is a synonym of 2nd, 3rd or nth priority - then in may be bad. Otherwise - why not?
I understand what you're saying. I guess it's better to tell people to try and put themselves in a place where they can code full time. For me it was an internship, for others it may be a trial week or month in a different part of their current job
Did you get an internship without being in school for a CS degree?
I'm at a point somewhere between not knowing how to code and not being skilled/experienced enough for a jr developer position, and would work for next to nothing, but every internship I see requires that you be in pursuit of a BS in CS.
Just start talking to people. Forget job descriptions. Send emails to people you would be interested in working with. Let them know what your skills and goals are. A few years ago I was exactly where you are now. I had a liberal arts degree, a bit of coding experience but skills that weren't sufficient for a junior dev position. I got some interviews just hustling and chatting with anyone I could get a hold of, and eventually I got a dev internship at a startup. I've been coding fulltime ever since.
Above all else don't let yourself get discouraged. There will probably be a dozen no's and/or people who just don't respond to your query but the person that gives you that first opportunity is probably the kind of person you want to be working with anyway.
Plenty of startups will take you on as an intern with little to no experience. If you put your reputation on the line and give them a few months of your time to figure it out and build something they need, they might hire you full time as a junior engineer. Shoot me an email if you'd like to talk more about this zack@zackshapiro dot com
What about someone who has a job where they code full-time (or close to it) but they don't enjoy what they're coding or they don't feel like they're getting better in their current position? Sometimes you're not in a position where you can leave at the moment and find a better coding position or you're not yet good enough at coding to get a job where you actually learn. It's incredibly hard to code for 30-40 hours a week and then try to do it for 5-10 hours a week extra after work to get better.
I'm worn out after 40 hours of work, so creating my own projects and/or working on open source projects is difficult. However, without doing that, I don't feel that I can move on to a more challenging development position because I have no code I can show.
I totally understand the feeling. I'm currently in a low pay full time coding job without benefits. I'm in no financial situation to consider quitting (I wouldn't last a month). Only doing what I do at work advances my skillset little, so I've been forced to do extra on nights and weekends. It is never easy to coerce yourself into working extra but I've found a couple of tactics that have helped immensely.
1. Do it for money. I find working for someone else motivates me pretty well. I wanted to learn how to use JS frameworks like ember or angular so I've done a couple of simple restaurant menu CMS systems for local businesses. I did them for peanuts on the condition that I didn't have hard deadlines. Even though I have the luxury of taking as much time as I feel like, I feel some obligation to anyone paying me for work. I've also found that it effectively narrows the focus of the work in a way that might be more challenging in a more free form project. It's a lot harder for me to not start including "cool" but often-useless features in my own projects while I tend to keep my work for others limited to what was agreed upon originally.
2. My other method is to set myself up with two or three productive activities and force myself to rotate between them. I might choose learning German vocabulary, refreshing math online and writing a simple app in a new language for a night and make an effort to always be doing one of those tasks. I try to look at this time as relaxation and free time itself, so I try to set few expectations. When I get bored/frustrated, instead of turning on the TV or opening the news, I switch to the next activity and repeat until its time for bed. You can move forward on unrelated hobbies this way, something that frustrated me when I first learned how to code and overdid the focus and attention I gave it, to the point of severe frustration.
Lastly, try to relax and take it easy. If you put yourself through Hell every night you'll quit and get nowhere. Take nights off when needed and get to bed at a decent hour. You won't see immediate returns so any strategy has to be looking toward the long haul.
What about working on your projects before work. Make the job that you're not interested suffer a little bit rather than the project that you're passionate about?
Can you switch jobs? There are so many companies that need even just a passable engineer. If you're not growing and learning in your current role, maybe it's time to find a new one?
"Have a real project you want to build" and "You have to throw yourself in or you will fail." are spot on.
At Thinkful (http://thinkful.com/) our students spend more than half their time on projects they start from scratch, using real tools for exactly this reason. As a result they have 10x the engagement and completion rates vs other online ed tools (MOOCs et al).
Failing is learning, but failing is tough. We make that easier.
I've been working on something which lets people follow along at their own pace and see exactly what goes into building a project. It involves a fair amount of just plinking away at a text editor and then compiling it and giving things a test run.
I set it up to show my sessions including any little lags, typos, or whatever else I might make along the way. The idea is to show how a real person works at this stuff, and to encourage other people to give it a spin at their leisure. To that end, I have a pause button, variable speed playback, buttons for jumping forward and backward, and of course unlimited restarts. All of this happens in the browser, and it's just text, not video, so it's pretty quick.
I use my own favorite text editor and build tool, but anyone so inclined can certainly use their own favorites and it will work out just the same. I try to twiddle a few things here and there to show what sort of differences they make in the end.
I'm actually holding back on some of the crazier bits so it doesn't seem to fly by. I don't use the reverse-i-search thing early in a session, for instance. This means I wind up typing out certain commands verbatim more often than I would in real life. Now, once I've used something once or twice I'll flip back in the history a line or two where appropriate, but that's about it. In real life, I use things like ^U ^W and ^Y far more than I do in those recordings.
Unfortunately, to truly capture how I normally work on things, I'd have to have it grab multiple windows in parallel. I don't normally drop out of my editor to run compilers. That's just something which happens for those "lessons".
These days I "drop out" of my editor with C-z to run compilers/system tools. That way you don't lose your editor state, but you also get the full shell (reverse-i search, etc) for whatever other tasks you're doing.
Just something that works for me; not sure if you've tried it. YMMV.
I suppose I could enable that while doing these recordings... or just use screen. Or hey, maybe I'll figure out the parallel recording situation and then it'll really be just like watching over my shoulder.
So my One Month Rails class is the biggest class on Skillshare at the moment (5000 students) and I can't echo this point enough:
"Here's why Codecademy doesn't work in the long term... You don't know how to set up a development environment. Any time you have the slightest inkling to build something for yourself leveraging what you've learned in Codecademy, you can't and probably don't know where to start."
I'm all for encouraging a solid understanding of the syntax of code, but it's a totally different skill set from building web applications – which requires an understanding of topics like MVC, authentication, authorization, deploying, and using 3rd party libraries (and which to use).
This is the kind of stuff people want to learn when they talk about learning how to code and most sites bait and switch them into learning loops, variables, and functions.
I can't for the life or me remember who said it, but:
"Learning to code is a try{}catch{}. Always be prepared to handle things going to wrong, because they will. Every language has a try catch for a reason. Try() is doing, Catch() is learning"
I rolled my eyes when I read the title expecting another compendium of codeacademy-like resources which get you started and then leave you out to dry. I'm finally beginning to feel like I'm actually learning to code by doing pretty much exactly what you described!
I should note that I was doing these things before I read the article but this post helps to reassure me that I'm on the right track. I glanced at the article about learning Rails and also found the RailsTutorial book to be a great resource even for a beginner like myself given its "dive in and start doing realistic projects" nature.
Totally agree on not having newbies learn to code in a browser. There are so many intangible things that they need to learn to actually produce anything meaningful aside from typing the code itself.
People I know who have tried codeacademy or something similar complain that they are just typing "magical" words that produce effects on the screen. Perhaps a way to remedy this is to have them actually download the source files after a lesson is done or something so they can see what they've actually created, outside of the course's blackbox framework.
I am learning how to code, and one important thing that I have realized recently is that it can be bad to focus on building specific projects too much. I have spent a lot of time banging my head into the wall on specific implementation problems that might have been spent more efficiently learning from tutorials or books. Since I have started setting aside time for "pure learning" I have gained the background knowledge in languages and libraries to figure out how to solve problems that come up.
Yeah, I did the same thing in that my first project was a bit overly ambitious! I ended up getting discouraged because I would always pour my programming time into this single project, but I simply didn't know enough in order to design it properly.
I found that by setting it aside and working on something else, I gained new perspectives as to how to approach the problems that I got stuck on with my first project.
> 7) Coding is failing a ton and understanding why. It's painful and frustrating
I'd argue that an aspiring programmer's ability to deal with frustration is probably the single biggest indicator of "success". Obviously it's an on-going process, and you're always learning, but I'd say the biggest difference between "trying to learn" and being able to do some basic programming is how you deal with those initial frustrations. It's really easy to give up and go do something you think you're better at.
I would recommend Harvard's CS50 program. It is the most complete package I've come across for beginners. Downloadable VM's with everything set up - video lectures, problemsets, forum for questions and so on. And the good part is that it isn't just one language - you are exposed to many of the building blocks(C,HTML,SQL,Javascript++) of modern computing.
I totally agree. I started with installing Eclipse, creating a new Android project, adding a single button and... Just going from there.
I had no intention of publishing it to the official Google Play Store, but I did, purely as a learning experience (and I sure learned a heck of a lot because it's definitely not a straightforward process).
And I'm sure we all have experiences like that, right? You'll be amazed at what you can do by just jumping in.
Thank you for the awesomeness you have infused your post with. I began on the very road you've suggested not to take about a year, never got anywhere with programming. Got a 9-5 after graduating then finally started doing what you've suggested...
Quit my cube job, got a technical internship, and code practically every breathing moment I'm not at work...friends and fun...what are those again? :P
> Coding is failing a ton and understanding why. It's painful and frustrating
I get what he is saying but I disagree, in that I think that coding is actually succeeding to get something working by any means necessary, even if you don't quite understand why. Be it getting your first web site up and running, getting your first program compiled, fixing your first bug, etc. There are a lot of hurdles and roadblocks you will face, especially when you are starting out, it will seem that every single piece of information is just out of your reach, like Tantalus and the grapes. It takes a lot of patience and perseverance to get through most programming problems, but that feeling of satisfaction of getting past these roadblocks is amazing. I still get that feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment, even though I'm 20+ years into my programming career.
The followup to that is that you look back at your code 6 months later, cringe, and then rewrite it to something that is an order of magnitude better.
So I set up a VPS for the first time this week, here's how it went:
1. Shell? SSH? Wtf is this? Console? Huh? Why am I using something that looks like DOS, it's 2013! Where is the GUI and menus?!
So I learned about Shell/SSH, connected to my server, root and all that stuff.
2. Navigating folders and directories - dear god, this was a nightmare. I never used 'cd \' since '98 and that's only cause I wanted to run DOS games.
3. Kept seeing all these commands with '-' that makes installing extensions seem oh so easy! I wanted APC for PHP, stared at this page (http://pecl.php.net/package/APC) for an hour, trying to figure out what to do. Googled like mad. Searching for anything.
Learned about "pecl install APC", nope no luck. Then I was told to compile it from source. Yeah, I know exactly what that means! Spent the next 4 hours trying to understand why phpize wouldn't work!
Oh, I wasn't doing it from the right directory. -_-
I mean, I'm slowly beginning to see how it all fits together but none of the education sites teaches you this stuff!
It's like learning cooking recipes when you don't know how to turn the stove on, or what a stove even looks like. Or what's the difference between gas and electricity stove, how to turn on the tap to get water, etc. You learn a great recipe, know all the ingredients and the cooking time down to the second, but when it comes to use the tools and actually cook? Nope - cause I don't know how to turn on the stove or know what a stove looks like! (I know this is an extreme analogy)
I wish tutorials would start with projects and setting it up from scratch. If you're going to show me how to do something localhost, you have to show me how to do it on a server (and set up) as well or else I'll never be able to make that connection. (Well not never, but makes it harder)
So…I definitely vote for teaching the environment before programming.
PS: I did eventually install APC…after an entire day :P Now I'm trying to find and learn about setting up master/staging/production (and what it all means).
Edit: Just to give some context of why I needed VPS - I wanted root access so I can make a wiki have clean URL (rewrite) and figured why not, learn about VPS. Then that's where I realized I need to learn 10 other things to do this one single thing. The APC was a suggested caching option to improve the site, and trying to do that also needed me to learn more stuff. So it's all kind of ties together when you're trying to accomplish a (seemingly) tiny thing.
You've identified a very real pain point, one that affects all programmers. One of the most difficult and annoying tasks is configuring the computer to run your darn software. I've sometimes spent days just setting up a computer (either a VPS, or my own computer). Unfortunately, this pain point never really goes away, although it does get easier as you learn more.
I've had many conversations with other programmers about solving this problem. We always fantasize about building an installer that just sets up everything you need for, e.g. Ruby on Rails. And people have tried! Every so often, you see an announcement about an open source project that promises to do just that. Even though this has been going on for years, I don't know anyone who actually uses these projects.
I think part of the problem is that the technology moves too fast for these one-click installers. They can't seem to stay current. Every time you get an update to the operating system, the database, the webserver, the web framework, the language runtime, etc etc, there's a potential for the one-click installer to break.
Another issue is interference from other stuff installed on the computer. I can't tell you how many times a piece of Unix software has failed to install because of something else I'd put on my computer and long since forgotten.
So one-click installers haven't been a panacea thus far. But I will say that the situation has improved dramatically in the last five years or so. Package managers--programs that automate installation of individual components--have gotten way, way better. It used to be that every other package I installed would fail the first time, and I'd have to do some kind of troubleshooting. That hardly ever happens anymore.
Now, this doesn't exactly make everything easy for new programmers. You still have to learn a lot of system administration to get anything done. Which brings me to my last point, which is a bit of advice for people just starting out:
You'll want to read some tutorials on various aspects of the Unix operating system. These will be very relevant to the problems mentioned in the parent comment: SSH, shell, installing packages, compiling from source, etc.. Generally, programming tutorials won't get into this stuff. You need Unix tutorials. This stuff will probably seem pretty boring in comparison to actual programming. It sure is for me. But it's a bit of unavoidable drudgery if you want your code to actually run.
An option is to use a pre-packaged virtual machine image with the main web application that you want if it's available, for example from http://bitnami.com/ or the Amazon AWS public store or installing one locally (VMware or VirtualBox Virtual Appliances etc)
I half disagree. If you want to learn to be a sysadmin then learn to be a sysadmin. If you want to learn to code you learn to code. People who want to learn to code want to know what to type that'll get the computer to spit out whatever it is they want it to spit out. Mixing in environment stuff like you describe is just going to complicate things and turn people off entirely.
Furthermore, most operating systems already have enough of the basics installed that you're able to get up and running with simple programming pretty quickly anyway. Learning to develop locally and deploying to a live server are very different. Yeah, both run just about identical software but the process is different. Locally, someone who's learning will install MAMP or xampp or something or copy and paste a line of code to get homebrew or rvm on their machine. There's a 50/50 mix of comfortable clicking around the GUI and typing in the terminal. If you're just learning and go right to the vps I think you're jumping the gun. The system may be the same but it takes some experience before you realize that what you were comfortable with when clicking around is almost the same thing you're doing in the vps over ssh except you have to know which command to run rather than clicking "install".
Beginner books always have a section dedicated to setting up your environment and sometimes take you all the way through deployment. Articles online don't necessarily need that as they mostly assume you'll find that information elsewhere and only concern themselves with the task at hand - coding.
Beyond all that I think that your frustrations are something you'll be grateful for in the future when you do get it. I knew how to code before I knew how to run a server. If I had learned the server stuff first and didn't quit then I wouldn't have understood why I was doing these things and I wouldn't have the knowledge of how everything from the language I was using to the server to the OS all worked together which is invaluable. If I were blindly following instructions on how to set up a lamp stack I wouldn't know that hey I don't need these apache modules or oh I can disable this ini setting, etc.
On one level I get your gas stove/kitchen tools analogy. But as someone who understands these things now, on another level I don't think it fits. These topics are so incredibly broad and complex that it makes sense not to lump them together. Besides, there are plenty of places where you can just plop your code and have it run from shared hosting to PAAS's like Heroku and such.
In the end its like the article says - these challenges are what'll teach you. I don't know any good programmers that simply memorized how to do things without having to earn the knowledge of how something works through tons of failure.
Furthermore, most operating systems already have enough of the basics installed
Maybe most operating systems do, but most laptops and PCs don't. Like 92% of laptops and PCs. Which makes your comment seem divorced from reality.
Worse still a lot of programming guides assume you have a linux variant which is so far from reality it's painful to watch. Though it's got a lot better recently as the ruby/python package managers are a lot easier to install on windows now.
A year or so back I was having a discussion with another HN user who was running free Python programming workshops. He actually ended up specifying no windows because it took so long to get everything working on them.
I suspect the more novice a programmer, less likely they are to have a Mac. You will only have a mac if you're rich, a programmer or your parents are rich. It's not an entry level OS. Let's not even pretend about linux.
While I agree with the whole "Learning how to cook" analogy, I still belive that, when starting, you don't really need to learn all the server setup mumble jumble. It is true, you DO need to know how to navigate through directories and such if you'll be developing directly in the server, and you need to learn how to setup your tools (if they don't come up prepackaged in your VPS solution), but aside from that I don't see the use of learning all of that.
On a side-note, this just gave me an idea for a series of posts in my blog ;D
Zack, you say pick a language "Ruby or Python". I started out in PHP (I have no recollection why) and while I'm far from perfect, I know it well enough to build functioning things and more importantly to figure where to find answers when I'm stuck.
Yet whenever I read other people's writing about coding, almost without fail people say "PHP sucks, do Python" or "PHP sucks, learn Ruby".
Without getting into the arguments about which language is better (I am fairly aware of the differences), can people who have experience with all three opine on whether it makes sense to throw out the time and energy I have invested in PHP (not to mention lot of well functioning code) and start from scratch with one of the other two?
Two answers for your one question: no, it absolutely doesn't make sense to throw out the time and energy you have invested in PHP, but yes, it absolutely does make sense to start from scratch with one of the other two. Both in fact, and any others that you come across. The more the merrier! Programming languages don't take up mutually exclusive niches in your brain, they complement one another.
I am learning to develop in Ruby on Rails. Thanks Mattan Griffel from Grow Hack who's also a teacher on SkillShare [dot] com. He has made a series of 'straight to the point' lectures guiding any person with any level of coding to create a basic version of Pinterest by the use of RoR. The series is called 'One Month Rails' (http://onemonthrails.com). I have been using and I am currently enrolled in his class on Skill Share. Personally I have browsed through hundreds of website looking for learning material and these videos have been the best for me so far!
You've gotta get started somewhere, and a safe place, in your browser, that doesn't require arduous setup ain't too shabby.
As Zack points out, there's a true difference between someone who "thinks they should code" and one who really wants it. Codecademy welcomes all comers, so it's hard to tell the difference. That shouldn't necessarily be an indictment those who start there.
At Thinkful (http://thinkful.com/) we send students to some Codecademy lessons, along with hundreds of hours of real-world projects and other resources.
I agree with the general idea, but think it can still serve benefits. From my own experience, Codecademy can be good training wheels but you have to go outside of it--essentially use it as a tool to know what's out there to play around with.
I agree with the rest of it, but would also add that in addition to writing out code, take notes, too. This can be alongside the code you just wrote or somewhere else, but take notes somewhere. This has a couple benefits: it usually means that you'll have to read an article or watch a video twice, plus it allows you think about what code is doing. Even if you're taking the advice to write out code, it's easy to gloss over that part.
Learning to set up your own environment builds tenacity. Having a one click install would take away from the learning experience and the beginner maybe more likely to quit if something breaks or goes wrong instead of googling around for a fix.
I learned that way. You need to think carefully about whether you really want to be weeding out people with insufficient tenacity at this early stage. I think there are a lot of people who, even if they're never software professionals, would benefit from a really easy-to-setup environment. There's plenty of time for playing with environments later, when they're better able to decide whether it's worth the trouble for them. Before they've got something running, a beginner doesn't know yet, and it makes little sense to deal with all the frustration on the slim chance they'll get something out of it.
Actually, though, Python is probably sufficient, especially with the nice-ish tools that come with it on Windows (nice-ish meaning less ugly than a cmd window).
Whenever I've hit challenges when learning to set up things (like recently making the move from Windows -> Linux and having to start from scratch with my dev environment) I've learned the most. Also, it teaches you that you've got the determination to succeed, which at some point you will need to be an effective programmer.
If people are interested in learning Ruby, Rails, or JavaScript in a "real" environment (running on your own machine, as a normal developer would), we have both a Environment Setup Guide (http://tutorials.jumpstartlab.com/topics/environment/environ...) and dozens of tutorials from complete walk-throughs to open-ended projects at http://tutorials.jumpstartlab.com/ , all Creative Commons Non-Commercial.
Jeff, thanks for the links. It was the help I needed in getting past the online based setups I have been using so far. Plus it was a pleasant surprise to see the curriculum of g|school.
P.S. Glancing at your other posts, I really like what you and Steve have said about g|school having high expectations for your students.
P.S.S- Look out for me in the applications, I am hoping to submit my application the end of April.
i have no formal experience in teaching, but given my own experience i'd have to say that having a technical mentor who is close to you is the single most important factor. important enough that it could probably stand alone (with the proper ambition of course).
i'd like to see some sort of matching service that helps match potential programmers with mentors, based on common interest. the "student" gets to learn in a context relevant to their interests, and the mentor gets an extra hand on their project.
That'd be interesting. Might be a fun weekend project to build. Get both people to apply, maybe add a 1m video portion? Match on language or age or years of experience perhaps?
Sometimes when you're learning something you need some hand-holding. I think it's a major weak point in the process of learning to code. Just googling for answers isn't always the answer.
Tommy Nicholas, cited in this article, here. Love this, disagree with the "forget Codecademy" part. Codecademy is incredibly useful and I still use it to learn things today, but it's really really important to understand what it's teaching you and what it's not.
It walks you through the thought process of various things you do when you write code and makes you actually write it, which is awesome. But that's where it ends so you've got to take the leap from there and actually BUILD something.
I feel like if Codecademy just made really awesome video tutorials for installing Python or Ruby, setting up rails or Django, using FTP, setting up MAMP, etc. then that would be sufficient to get people started after doing Codecademy.
Lynda.com and Treehouse both do those, but ultimately for me Google searches and blog tutorials generally win out (especially for Linux configuration).
Treehouse is awesome, it's just expensive. I recommend Treehouse very strongly if you want to build a career-level skill out of programming. Treehouse fucking rules.
I do ALWAYS recommend starting to Codecademy just to see if programming itself gets you off and to get your feet wet. Even now I still use it for that.
Incidentally, I still don't know how to use Ruby or Python functionally, so that's a pretty big failing of my learning so far. Like, I can write Python and Ruby scripts way better than Php, but Php is always installed and configured on every server and I know exactly how to use it in my dev environment, so I always default to that.
I'm making a Twitter App right now, and for speed I'm using a PHP API wrapper that is way worse than just writing the requests in Ruby. But. I don't know how to actually USE Ruby.
That felt good to say out loud, er, on the Internet.
That right there is the problem with Treehouse vs. Lynda - Lynda tends to have a decent chapter on setup, installation and gotchas... but to be honest, paper books have weaned me off Treehouse. I think their front-end stuff was great, but I can't help but feel that their back-end (read: Ruby/Rails) content was lacking.
Exactly. I recommend something like Codecademy to absolute beginners because it helps build muscle memory and gets your fingers wet. It helps you pass that initial mental paralysis where you're staring cluelessly at the screen. Codecademy needs to double down on these benefits and specialize for beginners (while making their limitations clear) or launch follow-up tutorials to help people advance and actually build real-world projects.
I think Codecademy is great for people who already know how to code a little bit. I can use Codecademy to learn HTML/CSS or about using APIs. However, I think for a complete neophyte, a book like Learn Python the Hard Way is significantly better. Someone HAS to walk you through setting up a programming environment, running an interpreter or compiling, etc. It can be incredibly frustrating and intimidating for first timers.
My friend Daniel says the same thing, he started with Codecademy and moved to Learn Python the Hard Way, and he definitely says they both had their merits but Learn Python the Hard Way got him to actually being able to code.
However, LPTHW wouldn't have made sense to him if he hadn't already done CA, so he liked having done them both.
I'm don't think I agree with this, I've been giving Codecademy a try recently to learn Python. I don't feel like I am any closer to actually building anything useful because all it has taught me is some syntax. I think the issue is because I already know just enough (from taking a course on C) to know how to solve the problems they give, but don't really know how to extend it to actually make something useful.
If I knew nothing about programming then I would find the basics of coding that Codecademy teaches to be useful as it is a different way of problem solving that needs to be learned.
Though it does a great job mastering you in syntax and semantics, with which you could solve trivial problems the world's never going to face, real learning comes from setting up a dev environment in your machine, and diving in.
Learning from mistakes best apply in learning to code, more than any other context.
I disagree that it cripples the other points. I just think that a lot of people try to find all of the failure points before they start. You can't start without having a bit of direction (I reference a book to use in my first post) but don't think about where the road will end up, just get on the road.
HN gives me the impression that on a bi-daily basis there's someone, somewhere (generally an American brogrammer with too much hair and weird glasses living in the Valleyr or NY) who WANTS that I want to learn to code.
Is that someone actually the exact same person (looks like it) ? Does he know that code can be executed outside of a browser ?
Everyone says, "Just pick something you want to build, and learn how to build it." I don't know what I want to build, because I don't know what I can build. That's like taking someone who says "I want to learn calculus" and saying "Well just think of a problem you want to solve."