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Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

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Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#181

Post by dev_0 »

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #131
emmo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of seems to assume that time and money in infinite, though. Buying a recipe book for one recipe seems like a profound waste of resources.

This sort of seems to assume that it is at all possible to gain knowledge and experience without making mistakes. Hiring people who do not perform seems like a profound waste of resources. Doing projects that fail seems like a profound waste of resources. Learning technology that will not be helpful later in your life seems like a profound waste of resources. When was the last time you found a cookbook where a signif…

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Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#182

Post by dev_0 »

corethree wrote: post #106
onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #41

There is a general lack of advanced materials in software engineering. This is one area where market economy works against common good, unfortunately. People who have the knowledge and want to capitalise on it are highly incentivised to preparing beginner level materials and maybe a tiny bit to prepare the something for people who already have a bit of knowledge. After that, the number of people who are your potentia…

I highly disagree. There's a huge amount of material out there for advanced software engineering. The problem is this material is exponentially harder and most programmers aren't interested in this stuff. What OP is talking about is essentially learning a new language which is sort of trivial and not advanced. It's sort of a parallel track and he likely wants something that doesn't start at the very beginning. Someth…

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Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#184

Post by onetimeuse92304 »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #153
nerdponx wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with a $200 book is that it's hard to tell the difference between a book that contains $100k of knowledge and a book that contains $100 of knowledge.

No programming book gives me $100k of knowledge. Let’s say the knowledge is 10% of the gain and 90% sweat. I need $1m in lifetime value I couldn’t have got otherwise. If it has that sort of value you build a business around that tech! See OpenAI for an example!

Yes, the knowledge in a book does not automatically bring value. A book in itself is worth as much as the warmth it can give when you throw it in a fire.

But IMO that's a stupid way to view books in general. You would have to contend that ALL books are worth nothing, because you have to expend effort to read it or try to actually make use of the knowledge in it.

So how I define value of a book? From the economics, this would be the opportunity cost which is the next best thing you could do. If you have better use of your time than reading any book then yes, books are worthless to you as long as you can do better things with your time.

For me, I found that reading books brings immense value to me by either directly bringing actionable knowledge or by causing me to think in new ways. Yes, these are my thoughts, but I argue I would not have them if I kept my brain just doing the same thing every day.

I attribute many hundreds of thousands of dollars of my income to ideas in books that I red and some of these books more than others. I am not listing these books here because I also believe that it is not about these books. It is about me getting value from the ideas that I would not know otherwise.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#185

Post by neillyons »

For Elixir Dave Thomas has a video series https://codestool.coding-gnome.com/courses/elixir-for-progra...

For a general programming book I recommend Unit Testing by Vladimir Khorikov https://www.manning.com/books/unit-testing which was recommended by Saša Jurić

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#186

Post by amykhar »

imjonse wrote: post #11

Peter Norvig's programming course from 10 years ago. It says there "no experience required", but it's intermediate-advanced actually. https://www.udacity.com/course/design-of-computer-programs--...

I was lucky enough to take that class the first time it was offered. Peter Norvig was quite active and had several hangouts with class members.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#190

Post by jventura »

aradove wrote: post #180
jventura wrote: post #178

If you're learning Python, and know other programming languages, I have this online ebook [1] that I use with my students so that they learn Python fast enough so that I can teach them about socket programming. Basically, in each chapter I give a small detailed introduction to the topic and then students do some exercises to solidify things. [1] https://github.com/joaoventura/full-speed-python

Can you recommend a resource for learning socket programming?

I don't have any significant recommendations. With my students I usually build three applications with sockets: a chat server/client, an HTTP webserver and an HTTP webserver serving JSON. Here's an example of an HTTP server using sockets [1], maybe you can follow and understand a little bit more about sockets.

[1] https://joaoventura.net/blog/2017/python-webserver/

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