21–29 of 29 posts
One of the best learning environments I've seen is the Python framework Web2py. It was developed by a professor originally for teaching purposes. Python is a nice clean language. You should be able to make some effective progress in an afternoon.
Let's talk about Chinese. Can you "learn" Mandarin by reading a few books on Mandarin, taking a few courses, attempting to read some books in Mandarin, and occasionally speaking a few words to that cute Chinese girl at work? Yes, you can "learn" Mandarin that way, but you can't Learn it. If you were REALLY passionate about learning Mandarin, you would have to go to China (or at least Chinatown) and stay a while. Then…
You can't expect to read art books and study the grand masters and one day magically be able to paint. You start with crayons in kindergarten and work your way up to oil on canvas. What you need to do is write code. Lots of code. Lots of badly broken, half-functional code. The software equivalent of a child's doodles. After six months you'll be writing code that kinda works some of the time, after two years you'll be…
Here's a slightly different piece of advice. When you get in 100 pages, around the point where you start getting lost and frustrated, stop reading and write some simple programs. Don't do the large projects everyone else is suggesting. Just some simple project euler programs or programming praxis. Writing a program that plays poker is always a good test project, if you can't think of anything. The reason for doing th…
Lots of great advice in this awesome article by AI guru Peter Norvig http://norvig.com/21-days.html
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I am like a toolbox, with all the tools I will ever need lain gently and neatly in the box, ready for me to use them. The toolbox is translucent so I can see them there.
The key to the toolbox is locked inside of it.
Just start typing at the interactive prompt (e.g., IDLE, included with python); when you finish typing a line, press return and see if it executes.
If it doesn't then type it again until it does.
But just start typing. It's a language you are learning--so start by speaking it.
repetition is the mother of skill.
All of the stuff in the books about lexical dispatch, aliasing, Liskov substitution principle, guarded re-binding, immutable namespaces--screw that. You'll come back to that stuff when the time is right and by then you will have already been doing all of those things.
Again: one line at a time. This will work, and you will have fun. i promise.