Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where does a wannabe hacker begin?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 70 posts

Re: Where does a wannabe hacker begin?

#31

Post by shiranaihito »

Hello.

A lot of people here recommended emacs, but it might not be the most suitable tool for you personally, or not the most suitable tool for a given task.

For example, if you want to code in Java, the best tool for that job is IntelliJ IDEA.

If you want to code in Common Lisp, the best tool for that job is emacs - mostly because it offers the best integration with Lisp (with an add-on).

Emacs and Vim both have their followers, and they have fought many religious wars over their editors' merits.

The point is that your choice of an editor need not be between emacs and vim. They just happen to be the preferred tools for most of "the big boys" around these circles.

Since you're aiming for web-development in a business environment, in your situation, you're probably more interested in making code appear on your screen than hard-core editor wizardry.

Don't spend too much time worrying about emacs or vim.

If you do want to settle in one of those camps, choose after you've tried or investigated both, and have a good idea of why you would prefer one of them over the other.

As for a programming language, I'd say that Python should be a safe bet.

It's a relatively elegant, mature language, which should be useful for all kinds of development.

One of the most popular web-frameworks, Django, also happens to be written in (and for) Python. It looks like a sensible and practical tool, and I suggest you check it out.

As a sidenote, PHP is not very highly regarded as a language by serious programmers. Its merit is getting stuff happening quickly.

Just like others have said, you need to learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and SQL too.

Using something like Slicehost would probably be a good idea too, so you'd get accustomed to the maintenance side of things.

I wish you good luck! :)

Re: Where does a wannabe hacker begin?

#32

Post by rokhayakebe »

Perry, i decided to learn how to program about a week ago. tuesday night i started with HTML (dont laugh). i think it is important to know those basics before you go on and learn server side scripting. i tried hackety hack before and php, but the problem is you want instant gratification so you wont stop. thursday night i stayed up an extra 3 hours past my normal time and created a nice html document with my pictures linked from tumblr, added an email form, comment form and submit buttons. off course the form did not submit anything to the server, but now i am hoocked, and instead of pinging developers and killing them with "what's the status" now i know within a few months i will be able to start creating simple web apps. so start small, then once you got html, xhtml and css locked, move to server side scripting.

Re: Where does a wannabe hacker begin?

#33

Post by tlrobinson »

rmk wrote: post #30
mdakin wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C is not the path of least resistance for the OP. He is neither trying to make a career out of software engineering nor hack on a UNIX kernel. He wants to be at the fringe of business and software and these days if that's where you want to be you can "get by" knowing only a high-level language really well and hiring/partnering with more specialized engineering talent as needed if the business-side requires it. Master…

Yes, I am in complete agreement with you. Which is why I suggested C. You only realise the huge productivity jump when you first program a small application in C and then do the same thing in Python / . Hence the C recommendation.

Also, learning C helps you understand what's going on at a lower level, which can be important.

Re: Where does a wannabe hacker begin?

#35

Post by tlrobinson »

vegashacker wrote: post #10
Perry wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great advice, thanks. I'll have to see what my school's policy is on that.

Or just do it, and ask for forgiveness later, as necessary. Your chance of being "caught" in a medium-to-large lecture is pretty low.

Agreed. Or just ask the professor. If I were a professor I'd be ecstatic if someone wanted to sit in on a lecture just to learn, not for credits.

However I've also had great professors who would allow it because they feared the students wouldn't be fully committed since they weren't obligated to do assignments and exams.

Re: Where does a wannabe hacker begin?

#36

Post by rcoder »

If you're hoping to get into web development, then you'll need to learn quite a lot of pieces of technology. For a professional, the minimum knowledge base is TCP/IP networking, HTTP, HTML, Javascript, the DOM, SQL, a bit of UNIX shell, and at least one general-purpose programming language like Python, Ruby, or PHP.

As a hobbyist, you can start smaller than that, of course. Learning HTML and a bit of Javascript is a great start -- if you can build simple client-side dynamic apps, moving into server-side scripting is a lot easier. Configuring a basic Linux server to host web applications (even if it's just a virtual machine, or a spare PC under your desk) is a big step forward, too.

As an economist who may want to do some web development, though, you might gain as much from learning a general-purpose language like Python as you will from web development. Being able to toss out a quick script to do your simulations or mine an existing data set may prove substantially more valuable to you than an in-depth understanding of PHP and Apache configuration.

Re: Where does a wannabe hacker begin?

#37

Post by apathy »

Start here:

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/

No, seriously. If you've never programmed before, this will teach you far more than you'll need, initially, but later on you'll realize that you picked up a lot of really good habits and never needed to unlearn the bad ones.

Try it. If you like it, you won't look back. If not, perhaps a career in finance isn't such a bad idea anyways.

Re: Where does a wannabe hacker begin?

#38

Post by apathy »

tiggyboo wrote: post #21

If your goal is to become a surgeon, don't start by learning to cast your own surgical instruments. Same principle applies here - hang with the econ, then hire a guy with stains all over his shirt when you're ready.

Not a bad idea by any stretch, but it helps to know what you're looking for when you do hire someone.

Plus, if you just have a little itch to scratch, it can be a lot less work to implement the damn thing yourself, regardless of whether it's elegant or scalable or perfect. Microsoft's original product was built on your model (Gates farmed out the compiler IIRC) but he certainly had a good idea of what qualities he was looking for in a programmer.

Re: Where does a wannabe hacker begin?

#39

Post by James_Johnson »

illicium wrote: post #16
mechanical_fish wrote: post #3

Your first challenge: take a generic PC (or a Mac, for that matter). Install Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Get Wordpress running and put up a simple blog. Make a post or two. Smile. Bonus points for using Drupal instead of Wordpress. You might prefer to do this exercise using a webhost like Slicehost. They'll hand you a VPS for $20 a month. The advantage here is that, when you're done, you'll have a public website i…

Two more keywords: vim. mercurial. ;)

Well, if he's going to learn to be a hacker he might as well learn about all of the age-old flamewars too.
Post reply on HN