Ask HN: High School Student Looking For Learning Resources

Hello everyone, my name is Brandon and I'm a junior in high school. I have been programming in Python for almost a year now and have been, for the most part guided by my teacher. Now I'm reaching a point where my programs are to complex and asking my teacher for feedback is time consuming, preventing me from programming as much as I want. So I would like to take on the role of teacher for myself, and be active in the hacker community.

I have the basics of programming down and have been practicing MVC framework for desktop applications. I'm currently getting into Django to start learning web frameworks and databases. I’m not sure where I should go from here. I am stuck on what resources to use, and how to get word of upcoming resources.

Can anyone recommend some resources I can use for independent learning such as websites to follow, and books to read, that will make sense to me but is respected by the professionals. The resources I find are either not complex enough or to complex. If anyone can help me get on a path so that I can be in charge of my own learning, I would be very grateful.

So something that worked for me when I was starting out was to reverse engineer an existing Opensource project or maybe even look at their buglist. IMO reading code and figuring out the intuition behind it is almost half the battle. You may also want to pick up some engineering/algorithms/computer science books to get the underlying (and almost universally) applicable concepts.

Coursera is a good place to start.

Don't worry too much about whether or not the sources are "respected by professionals." Rather, you should focus on whether or not the information is good.

If you're interested in theory, I would point to iTunes U; I've been impressed with what I've seen of the courses there. I personally can't recommend any books (that's not really my learning style; I'm much more hands-on).

For the mechanics of programming, there's nothing better than just writing code. The Python docs are a great source of information, as are sites like Stack Overflow; search engines will be your friend if you get stuck. Open source code can be a good reference, as mentioned below, for seeing approaches to a specific problem (or implementations of a specific algorithm), but pouring through reams of others' code probably isn't the best use of time.

Overall, you sound like you're off to a good start. I'm a senior in high school, but, a year into my learning, I wasn't nearly as far along as you.

Thanks for the Udacity resource I will definitely go check that out. Just wondering but do you have any finished public projects? I would really like to see how another high schooler approaches programming.

I guess you're mainly looking for python related stuff. But if you're open to alternatives and me being a c guy, I would suggest hacking through the linux man pages and libc, it will definately help your overall programming skills and understanding of cs.

Here's a link (posted elsewhere on HN) to intro c programming resouces online: http://www.mycplus.com/featured-articles/best-free-programmi...