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Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?

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Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?

#92
One more thing, as a self-taught programmer, I struggle to understand other people's code. I would therefore like to read more about how programmers _inspect_ code so they may modify how it works. For example, let's say you find a third-party package (I'm using Python, so we call these modules), and you want to fork some particular package so it uses a database instead of config files.

Now I get the general idea of what I could do--clone the code, start editing it, setting breakpoints, walking the code execution, and essentially rewriting making their code my code. But it's a tangled web, no? Not easy. And then there must be (?) shortcuts? Plus, I'd like to read about the terminology and methods so I can search for other people's tutorials.

Re: Ask HN: What programming tutorial/course/article/blog would you like to see?

#93

One more thing, as a self-taught programmer, I struggle to understand other people's code. I would therefore like to read more about how programmers _inspect_ code so they may modify how it works. For example, let's say you find a third-party package (I'm using Python, so we call these modules), and you want to fork some particular package so it uses a database instead of config files. Now I get the general idea of w…

> And then there must be (?) shortcuts?

The shortcut is that if the code is well-structured, the use of config files should be isolated and clearly visible and you replace that without touching or needing to step through the rest.

But that depends on the code structure.

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