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Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?

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Re: Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?

#101

Post by feral »

aasasd wrote: post #93

I have two requests in this regard. - If there's some way to learn playing chess beyond just the rules without memorizing an encyclopedia of openings, I'd be grateful for links. I.e. I currently can stare at a position for a while and figure out a couple next moves that should be good. I'd like to elevate this to figuring out a bit more moves. (Though I have a suspicion that it's a question of ‘rinse and repeat until…

I'm only a middling chess player, but:

> (Though I have a suspicion that it's a question of ‘rinse and repeat until I remember all the openings anyway’.)

Its not that. There's a lot of interesting principles to learn, after 'how the pieces move', without just learning openings. Most people will say not to focus on openings until you are at least intermediate.

Most chess books will do what you ask, just Google for recommendations and reviews.

Example book: Play Winning Chess, Yasser Seirawan

Re: Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?

#102

Post by phaus »

aphextron wrote: post #11

Hartl's Rails tutorial. Probably the best intro to modern full stack development I've ever come across. https://www.railstutorial.org/book

As a beginner trying to learn to program a long time ago, rails was possibly the worst resource I attempted to use. You follow a complicated, tutorial to set everything up so you can actually start. Then you type a few words and then a bunch of complicated looking files are generated automatically in a way that it's hard for a beginner to even know what sections he's supposed to be able to understand.

Maybe it clicks for some, but I had a better time starting with HTML/CSS and then learning JavaScript before moving on to Python.

Re: Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?

#103

Post by weaksauce »

aasasd wrote: post #93

I have two requests in this regard. - If there's some way to learn playing chess beyond just the rules without memorizing an encyclopedia of openings, I'd be grateful for links. I.e. I currently can stare at a position for a while and figure out a couple next moves that should be good. I'd like to elevate this to figuring out a bit more moves. (Though I have a suspicion that it's a question of ‘rinse and repeat until…

lichess.org has some interactive puzzles and learning things. very fun to get the basics/intermediate stuff in.

Re: Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?

#104

Post by filoleg »

aasasd wrote: post #93

I have two requests in this regard. - If there's some way to learn playing chess beyond just the rules without memorizing an encyclopedia of openings, I'd be grateful for links. I.e. I currently can stare at a position for a while and figure out a couple next moves that should be good. I'd like to elevate this to figuring out a bit more moves. (Though I have a suspicion that it's a question of ‘rinse and repeat until…

I cannot help you with (1), but I think I can help with alleviating your fears regarding (2).

Just by understanding scales and progressions you won't "start hearing them everywhere" and "fall into patterns". There are no "right" and "wrong" progressions in contemporary music, they are just there. By understanding the theory, you will see why you might like certain things and dislike others. It won't take away your enjoyment from music and it won't change your music tastes. Whatever progression is "right" in someone's eyes will be "wrong" in eyes of another person.

Music theory is as close to math as one can get in arts, imo. There are no "right" or "wrong" numbers, everything is very neutral and non-biased. Yes, some progressions sound more right or wrong to most people, but that's mostly because of our collectively shaped taste of music, and learning theory will not force you into any kind of tastes on its own. It might motivate you to explore more diverse music, as you will be looking for more novelty in patterns, but that imo is a good thing and, in fact, is the opposite of being locked into the "ivory tower".

So my advice on it would be to stop fretting and to just dive deep into the music theory :)

Re: Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?

#105

Post by IMAYousaf »

I am a huge fan of Build Your Own Lisp in C. I knew how to program since I was a kid. It was all inelegant but working code. Using this website's walk through helped me to refine my understanding. Anecdotally, I suggested it to 2 beginners I knew, and they found it very intuitive.

http://www.buildyourownlisp.com/

Re: Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?

#106

Post by maire »

marai2 wrote: post #28

Can someone recommend an easy tutorial for beginners for getting into electronics?

Getting Started in Electronics by Forrest Mims. The entire book is hand written and hand drawn. I think this is why the book is concise and direct. It is a work of art.

Re: Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?

#109

Post by jauco »

Jeff duntemans book on assembly language. It used the 386 processor under DOS which was way more approachable than what we currently have, but it really taught me how a computer works from the bottom up.

Edit: apparently there’s now a third edition for recentish computers: http://duntemann.com/assembly.html

Re: Ask HN: Your favourite tutorial for total beginners?

#110

Post by ergo14 »

https://docs.pylonsproject.org/projects/pyramid-blogr/en/lat... - because I wrote it.

I've found that newcomers struggle with many concepts during presentations so I wrote my own tutorial for beginners.

On many meetups and hackathons I've noticed people break their environments or Linux installations. It's a bit much but we try to start from scratch showcasing how to use venv to get things going and create a small application demonstrating different concepts of web development, from templating, to DB migrations, business logic and auth.

I've ran few workshops with this tutorial and we had very good results.

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