Ask HN: How do you read programming books? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How do you read programming books?

#81

Post by phaus » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 7:31 AM UTC

TomJohnson70 wrote: post #37

I have read ALL the comments below. They are ALL excellent. I have a BS in Engineering, 1976, with only Fortran IV from the card key-punch days. Ugh! Worked on a defense software program and learned JOVIAL and VAX/VMS at work and C and some Unix at home. Prior, I had read Wirth's Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. Pascal = JOVIAL = ADA. C seemed to have the real power with access to the underlying computer via…

>My first short-term suggestion for a newbie is to buy and read "The C Programming Language", 2nd Edition, by Kernighan and Ritchie (K&R2).

Many parts of this book, even in the first few chapters, seem like they were written for someone that's already a programmer in another language. I ended up giving up on it to use another source because it didn't seem to explain anything very well to a beginner. I'm going to attempt it again once I finish reading a gentler introduction.

Re: Ask HN: How do you read programming books?

#82

Post by pgathogo » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 9:06 AM UTC

aj7 wrote: post #53

oceanghost wrote: post #39

I'm going to give away the secret of autodidactic learning here. I developed this technique in college. Although there was no such thing as YouTube back then, iTunes etc. I get at least two, preferably three data sources on the same subject. Read them all in Parallel and take notes. Getting multiple perspectives is critical. What works for me is two well-made textbooks and a Youtube series, iTunes university, etc cou…

Exactly how I aced high school. And got into MIT. Much less useful to me in college. Even less useful now. I must have 100 programming books in Google drive. The only way to learn something (and certainly programming) at a high level is to force yourself to write down a well- defined, closed-end problem, and then sit down and solve the motherf_____r. You learn what you need to learn, build, and invent along the way,…

I tried this technique with C++ but soon I realized it was a dead end. You try to build anything with C++ without some inner understanding of concepts like const, templates and STL, and I can bet things will blow up pretty fast.

Re: Ask HN: How do you read programming books?

#83

Post by pgathogo » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 9:08 AM UTC

pumanoir wrote: post #19

jasode wrote: post #5

1) Make sure you're reading a quality book. Sturgeon's Law[1] is true -- 90% of everything is crap including programming books. Check amazon reviews, forum recommendations for consensus of quality books. (E.g. many of OReilly "Head First" series of books have cute cartoons but they actually don't have quality content.) 2) Most programming authors do not write about tradeoffs . They write about language syntax or libr…

Completely disagree on the "Headfirst books" comment. All the head first books I have read (Java, Design Patterns, Android, C, Ruby) have very high quality content. I have read great books on all these subjects along HFs. i.e. The Design Patterns Smalltalk Companion, K&R, etc. The HF books really help visualize and actually enjoy the subjects, they also have great exercises that help to cement the concepts one has ju…

Yeah, head first Java was really good.

Re: Ask HN: How do you read programming books?

#84

Post by jmnicolas » Wed, Nov 22, 2017, 9:58 AM UTC

keithnz wrote: post #54

99% of the time I don't anymore. I used to read a lot, now I just pull information from the net, I have feeds of information exposing me to new ideas. Most technical frameworks have a ton of information readily available. The only books I go to are Math and Algorithm books I have on my bookshelf when I know something obscure I want is in them. Learning falls into two categories for me - Things you don't know you don'…

> Things you don't know you don't know

Is Donald Rumsfeld a parent of yours ? ;-)