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Show HN: Learn to Code for Free

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Re: Show HN: Learn to Code for Free

#121

Post by lukaa »

hatsix wrote: post #4

I'm looking for courses that seem to be the opposite of this... no language or programming at all, but instead looking at the process of breaking down problems. We've hired several devs out of bootcamp, and they're all taught how to code, but not how to solve problems using code... Anyone have material that might be good for this? Books, videos, courses?

I would recommend you to start with general problem solving methods https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_solving#Problem-solvin... and then choose one that best suites you.

Re: Show HN: Learn to Code for Free

#122

Post by freehunter »

alexhakawy wrote: post #87
freehunter wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going through it as a tech professional who is a non-developer. I know how to code, I just don't do it professionally (and I don't know Ruby, let alone Rails). I'm loving it. Obviously the "here are some commands" and "go find Google Chrome" made me laugh a little but I understand the audience they're for. I love how quickly we get into actually creating something, it keeps my interest when I see progress. It's b…

for you it sounds great but for someone like me I like to understand how things work under the hood. Yeah I made a blog in 15 minutes using Ruby and Rails but how did that happened under the hood? I like to fully understand things not just be told how to do it. I guess that's why PHP being embedded in HTML allows me to see the bigger picture.

Well, I think there's two things to that.

First, from what I understand, Rails has a lot of "magic". So on that note, you're probably just not going to like Rails or Rails-like frameworks in general (like Django, lots of magic). PHP or even something like Flask might be better for you. Different people like different levels of abstraction, and believe it or not you can write web pages in C. PHP was originally designed as an abstraction over C, to add a little "magic" so you didn't need to know how things worked under the hood in order to get a web page running. These days, Rails is the new magic, and PHP is the new "under the hood".

Secondly, the course does go into more detail later on (I'm on #20 of the "build a saas app" right now), where after every video that you write code, there's a video that explains why you did that and what it does to the program. It actually goes into more detail than I was expecting for a tutorial that starts off with "here's how to install Google Chrome".

Re: Show HN: Learn to Code for Free

#123

Post by sixhobbits »

hatsix wrote: post #4

I'm looking for courses that seem to be the opposite of this... no language or programming at all, but instead looking at the process of breaking down problems. We've hired several devs out of bootcamp, and they're all taught how to code, but not how to solve problems using code... Anyone have material that might be good for this? Books, videos, courses?

This is focused on teaching "computer science without a computer" to children, but some of my professors used it for bachelors students too. I'd highly recommended it to people of any age looking to get started with learning computer science: http://csunplugged.org

Re: Show HN: Learn to Code for Free

#124

Post by freehunter »

mcfrankline wrote: post #67

Roben, I'm actually disappointed to find out that you've made this course free. It seems the folk on reddit gave you a nasty bit of pressure? Well, i don't see how you're going to be able to maintain this project(100's of hours of videos) without earning anything for it. Quality is bound to decrease in the long run. I believe you should stick with your previous model(Free for a month or two, subscribe when its useful…

Obviously I don't have insight into what the creator will be doing with it in the future, but what I fully expect is these videos will be free, but the additional videos on React and other frameworks/languages will be offered at additional cost.

Re: Show HN: Learn to Code for Free

#125

Post by freehunter »

eveningcoffee wrote: post #97
robtherobot wrote: post #2

I've decided to make my course on complete full-stack web development free, forever! It's a massive amount of content. Please let me know what you think of the course!

Based on the skimming through the titles it looks like a quite complete material. As it looks like after completing this course people should be quite capable to build their own solutions, I would recommend you to cover the security aspect more broadly. Perhaps cover multiple commonly known attack vectors (and how they are mitigated) and basics of the cryptology. I would also suggest you (based on the other comment h…

I'm not sure he's suggesting everyone should only ever use Chrome, but rather heading off "it doesn't work on my system!" complaints that are common with these tutorials. He goes into painstaking detail on exactly which version of Rails, exactly which version of Ruby, and exactly what gems you need to use to make sure the learner is using the same environment as the teacher. Suggesting that everyone use the same browser goes hand in hand with this. If you're a beginner and you run into compatibility issues with your browser, you might be turned off and quit. Making sure everything is the same while you're learning is really just good practice.

Re: Show HN: Learn to Code for Free

#127

Post by SonOfLilit »

hatsix wrote: post #4

I'm looking for courses that seem to be the opposite of this... no language or programming at all, but instead looking at the process of breaking down problems. We've hired several devs out of bootcamp, and they're all taught how to code, but not how to solve problems using code... Anyone have material that might be good for this? Books, videos, courses?

Human Resource Machine is a decent game (from the creators of World of Goo!) that teaches this.

Re: Show HN: Learn to Code for Free

#128

Post by cr0sh »

ue_ wrote: post #119
hatsix wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parse this file and tell me the total of all $ amounts, and the line where we've reached 50% of the total $. How do you approach this problem and break it down. I've seen problems like this solved by looping through the file twice, because they answer one question at a time... But I'm hoping there is something out there that can teach the general process of breaking down the problem, identifying loops, identifying ge…

I have no idea if this works (it did for 3 test cases), and I still end up reading through the array (but not the file) twice. # assuming file with $100\n$200\n$23\n$50 etc. linenum_vals = [] with open('numbers.txt') as input_file: for i, line in enumerate(input_file): try: linenum_vals.append([i, float(line[:-1][1:])]) except ValueError: print("Not a number value on line", i) total = 0 for i in linenum_vals: total +…

Thinking a little outside of the box - but if you could sort the lines by amount in ascending order, then total from both ends, take half after each addition, then shift a pointer to where "about half" would be based on where you were in the totaling (and which end) as you go.

I don't have any specific implementation - or if this idea would even work - but I do think sorting the lines first might be of help toward a better solution (I could be completely wrong on this). As well as tackling the totaling and checking from both ends of the list.

You'd have to keep track of everything, of course, in order to know at the end where in the -real list- (unsorted) the half-way total point is at. If this idea has any merit at least.

Re: Show HN: Learn to Code for Free

#130

Post by pythonaut_16 »

ue_ wrote: post #119
hatsix wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parse this file and tell me the total of all $ amounts, and the line where we've reached 50% of the total $. How do you approach this problem and break it down. I've seen problems like this solved by looping through the file twice, because they answer one question at a time... But I'm hoping there is something out there that can teach the general process of breaking down the problem, identifying loops, identifying ge…

I have no idea if this works (it did for 3 test cases), and I still end up reading through the array (but not the file) twice. # assuming file with $100\n$200\n$23\n$50 etc. linenum_vals = [] with open('numbers.txt') as input_file: for i, line in enumerate(input_file): try: linenum_vals.append([i, float(line[:-1][1:])]) except ValueError: print("Not a number value on line", i) total = 0 for i in linenum_vals: total +…

I would probably keep a running total as I read through each line, then store `line_number: running_total` in a dictionary.

At the end, return the highest key in the dictionary for your total, and then run a reduce that returns the first key/value pair that is >= half the total

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