Ask HN: How to become a better programmer? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How to become a better programmer?

#61

Post by joe_the_user » Mon, Dec 28, 2009, 6:22 AM UTC

KevinMS wrote: post #46

ErrantX wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing to do with style: the other sort of presentation :) i.e. I believe you started the response with a rather silly statement then structured the rest in a sort of out-of-breath "OMG SRSLY" way. Unreasoned response is bad - but badly structured reason is worse. I apologise for the rudeness but I feel that sort of posting needs to be discouraged. I'd have let it pass but for the cancer comment: that's just idiotic…

This is probably one of the reasons they experimented with removing the down-voting on comments. Some people, rather than vote on relevance or insight of the comments feel they should be enforcing their own arbitrary standards.

I think that allowing mean-spirited posts to be down voted is useful. Sometimes it reminds me I need to be a bit more constructive.

Re: Ask HN: How to become a better programmer?

#62

Post by mattm » Mon, Dec 28, 2009, 9:11 AM UTC

Buy a subscription to Safari Online and spend 15 minutes each day reading about programming.

It doesn't really matter what you read. Just pick a book that currently sounds interesting and read it. Since you are interested in OO PHP, there is a book called something like "Developing Object-Oriented Applications in PHP 5"

Re: Ask HN: How to become a better programmer?

#63

Post by bigjust » Mon, Dec 28, 2009, 3:39 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #10

Hey Paton, The quickest way to become a better programmer is to take a real world problem and then to solve that with a technology that is as far removed from the ones that you are already familiar with as you can imagine. Since you're already in to the imperative mode why not try a functional or a logic language for a change to see what the other side of the street looks like ? The interesting bit in that approach i…

more specifically, take a real problem that your having ("Scratch The Itch"). That'll provide the ample motivation to spend a lot of time you wouldn't normally. Just build something. If you need to create a blog or whatnot, instead of using a pre-packaged platform, writing it in whatever tech you want to learn. Then you'll benefit two-fold, even though it takes longer than installing wordpress.