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Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

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Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#51

I'm still partial to LearnXinYMinutes[0]. It's how I learned enough MatLab/Octave in a couple hours to test out of an intro CS course. Usually I just use that site in addition to the official tutorial when a concept really stumps me. Here's their article on Elixir[1] [0]: https://learnxinyminutes.com [1]: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/elixir/

What an amazing resource. Thank you for this. And even more thanks to whoever put this together.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#53

The obvious “next step” is experiential, i.e., write complicated programs. Books about writing compilers, databases, operating systems, emulators, file systems, etc. are all useful.

Do you have any book recommendations for those topics?

"Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective" is a great introductory systems textbook on everything going on in a computer.

For more advanced C/C++ developers I can recommend "The Linux Programming Interface" - (https://man7.org/tlpi/). It is a GREAT compendium for writing code against the POSIX API. I have a (legal) copy of this book on all the computers I have access to.

"The Database Redbook" - (http://www.redbook.io) is a valuable source on database implementations.

"Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools" (Dragon Book) is a great starting point. The book is out of print and but I think it should still hold up for most basic use-cases.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#54
Besides most courses being beginner-focussed, there are at least two other related problems:

- Most advanced courses sell themselves dishonestly as beginner-friendly even if they aren't after the first couple of lessons. On the free market everyone is after every single potential customer, no matter what.

- Everything is stretched out so much that information density is annoyingly low. Again free market pays per page and minute and not value.

You might have more luck looking at resources produced free from these constraints and the best place I know is university courses. Still, good ones are hard to come by, but I learned a ton at uni I'd never had learned outside.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#55
I don’t have any general course recommendations but the strange loop conference videos have been the most inspiring for me. I hope to attend soon, and a life goal of mine is to have something interesting enough to present there.

For Elixir, Dave Thomas’ coding gnome “elixir for programmers” course skips all the menial BS about “what is a string” etc and goes right into the meat and potatoes of leveraging the language correctly. I loved it.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#56
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it apologizes profusely, tells you you’re correct, and fails to fix its reasoning or the examples it gives you.

I was trying to get it to write some Elixir code to handle Erlang B calculations and it just couldn't figure it out, but it was pretty confident with the wrong things it was printing out.

The rust borrow checker often requires too much critical thinking for ChatGPT, as well.

LLMs confer a tremendous productivity boost. You just have to understand their limits and know when it's faster to think through and write the solution yourself.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#57
post #52

It's not Elixir, but I'm working through Jeremy Koppel's "Advanced Software Design Course". I've been coding for 22 years and it is definitely growing me. https://www.mirdin.com/

I took his course as well. It is indeed advanced. I certainly learned a fair amount from it. (coding for 15 years)
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