We had a lot of "learn x in y hours/days" books like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Hours-Sams-Teach-Yourself-6th/dp/0672...
What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
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Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#22There was this horrible site called experts-exchange.com (note the hyphen) that dominated search results, but IIRC they made you pay to see the answers.
You could always scroll down to the bottom of the page where they were uncensored.
IIRC: _can_, not _could_. They only started doing that when Google started punishing them in their search results for not showing others what they showed Google's robots.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#23Borland C++ came with 5 thick books as a reference. It was great. Powerbasic came with a big book, part tutorial, part reference. Schneider CPC had a big programming book with it. So it wasn't bad at all! When you extended your programs with stuff like mouse-support advanced graphics, you read through the readme.txt that was delivered with the library (the libraries could be bought, were freeware, came from your friend or were delivered on magazine-disktettes). Of course, getting help when unexpected problems popped up, was much more difficult without the internet. But then again, you were usually not mangling with a bunch of languages like (HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, Typescript, Angular, React......) but were rather stuck with one programming language that you used for everything. Basic, Turbo Pascal, C, C++... you used one of them for many years as the average guy. So after some time, you got a feeling for it and could work around problems.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#24I literally begged my mom to buy a couple of books for me. The Debian sysadmin bible and some mixed programming for linux book that featured bits from many languages like bash, perl, tcl.
We could just barely afford computers for myself so I am eternally grateful to my mom for working nights while I seemingly played around with Linux and scripting in my room.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#25In terms of using Stack Overflow to help you track down a problem? The answer, of course, is found in this relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/979/
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#26Does anyone else find quora to be a "fluff" Q&A site? I so much prefer the stackoverflow and friends approach.
Everytime someone asks what you'd think would be a simple yes or no question, the top answer is a 600-word story about something their mother did on a hippie commune in the 80's, or something. It's bloody irritating, yet I keep on reading. What can I say, it's something to read when you're in a waiting room.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#27I actually have quite fond memories of the documentation that came with Sun workstations around '90 - a huge amount of documentation and boxes of ring binders to put them in. Later on you even got a complete set of PostScript books for NeWS.
I learned a lot of lower level Unix programming from those Sun documents.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#28I was extremely lucky and stumbled across a particular IRC channel where some kind souls took pity on me and patiently answered my questions and gave me advice. I think it's fairly likely I wouldn't be a professional programmer today if I hadn't found that channel / those people.
For me at least, there was a certain level of aptitude I needed before I was able to productively seek out knowledge on my own. The range of possible things-to-learn in the programming world is so vast and daunting that I needed some hand-holding at the outset, until I had enough knowledge to reasonably separate things I needed/wanted to learn about from things I could confidently disregard.
If I were learning from scratch today, I think it's fairly likely I would still need something similar, even with the existence of SO.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#29All these stories are reminding me of m first encounter with programming. My Grandpa gave me his $600 Visual Basic (5?) book + software when I was 13 (~15 years ago). He didn't have the registration key, but I naively thought I could get lucky with a 16+ digit code. The first code I tried failed, but I tried changing the last digit and after a couple of tries got it. I didn't know what it was called at the time, but I instinctively guessed it could be a checksum, and somehow, that's how Microsoft protected their $600 product in 2002. Anyway, my Grandpa passed before I went to college but I think we would have had a lot of fun talking programming, because I was much more interested in pure math in HS when he died. That first programming book was definitely what got me interested though.
Re: What was it like to self-learn programming before Stack Overflow? (2016)
#30i just worked through books (you know the ones with animals on them) and online courses like in school. i don't think stackoverflow is a great place to learn programming, it's only good for looking up specifics.