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What is your recommended beginner's hacker training course?

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Re: What is your recommended beginner's hacker training course?

#11
post #2

What is the fastest way to learn "hacking" to a reasonable level such that you can apply for YC? Of course, you need a product/idea to apply, but what will be the fastest way to acquire the necessary skill such that you can build a reasonably good product / to actualize your idea? Finding a hacker co-founder is a shortcut but it is not considered an answer here. I want to have a full schedule, e.g. firstly read this…

I'd start with the video lectures of SICP: http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/ After that you'd probably want to learn some web stuff like html, css and javascript. You can pick these up by looking at the sources of other peoples' pages, and by using w3schools: http://www.w3schools.com/ Good luck!

As a second source (it's sometimes helpful to hear material from more than one perspective), UC Berkeley has some podcasts from a Scheme course which uses SICP:

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906978270

I listened to a few of them a while back, just to check them out. Not bad, if you can ignore the lecturer's occasional side-trip into politics (well, it IS Berkeley).

Re: What is your recommended beginner's hacker training course?

#12
post #2

What is the fastest way to learn "hacking" to a reasonable level such that you can apply for YC? Of course, you need a product/idea to apply, but what will be the fastest way to acquire the necessary skill such that you can build a reasonably good product / to actualize your idea? Finding a hacker co-founder is a shortcut but it is not considered an answer here. I want to have a full schedule, e.g. firstly read this…

I'd start with the video lectures of SICP: http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/ After that you'd probably want to learn some web stuff like html, css and javascript. You can pick these up by looking at the sources of other peoples' pages, and by using w3schools: http://www.w3schools.com/ Good luck!

Ars Digita Univeristy is roughly the first year MIT computer science coursework free online. It has yet another version of SICP, plus several other useful bits. The videos can be had on DVD for $75 or downloaded (recommended donation $0.25 per video).

The turnaround on the DVD is a bit slow, though. Took me about three weeks to get mine (I don't mind, but you asked for "fastest" and that would slow you down).

Re: What is your recommended beginner's hacker training course?

#13
post #6
post #2

What is the fastest way to learn "hacking" to a reasonable level such that you can apply for YC? Of course, you need a product/idea to apply, but what will be the fastest way to acquire the necessary skill such that you can build a reasonably good product / to actualize your idea? Finding a hacker co-founder is a shortcut but it is not considered an answer here. I want to have a full schedule, e.g. firstly read this…

Your acceptance is based entirely on your idea (even though ideas are worth "nothing," heh) and your past projects. So learn some lisp to score brownie points and outsource a resume-filler project of your design to some cheep foreigners. You'll be ready to go. As for hacking in general. The only way to learn is to create real programs. Books are a very small part of learning. I wouldn't recommend any. Oh and don't te…

As for not telling the YC guys...they'll notice. You won't have to tell them.

Ideas don't matter (except to show that you're thinking hard about solving a real problem for someone). You want to have a working demo to show them.

Re: What is your recommended beginner's hacker training course?

#14
post #2

What is the fastest way to learn "hacking" to a reasonable level such that you can apply for YC? Of course, you need a product/idea to apply, but what will be the fastest way to acquire the necessary skill such that you can build a reasonably good product / to actualize your idea? Finding a hacker co-founder is a shortcut but it is not considered an answer here. I want to have a full schedule, e.g. firstly read this…

Norvig: Teach yourself programming in ten years

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Re: What is your recommended beginner's hacker training course?

#15
post #3
post #2

What is the fastest way to learn "hacking" to a reasonable level such that you can apply for YC? Of course, you need a product/idea to apply, but what will be the fastest way to acquire the necessary skill such that you can build a reasonably good product / to actualize your idea? Finding a hacker co-founder is a shortcut but it is not considered an answer here. I want to have a full schedule, e.g. firstly read this…

I would recommend the classic book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Languages. Its available for free online. It is the book taught at MIT. I do want to say it's not easy after the first couple of chapters. The videos are available online as well. But this is a great way to start.

For those that don't want to google it,

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

Re: What is your recommended beginner's hacker training course?

#16
As others have said, start writing code, immediately. I mean right now. Like, this second. Stop reading right here. Open a programming tutorial website and start coding.

I mentioned ADUni above. It's a great way to spend part of your first six months of learning. I've been a hacker since I was eight (I went the Commodore 64 route someone else mentioned starting in 1981, but I don't recommend that path for anyone...Open Source and modern languages provide a far better learning experience...hell, I didn't see C until I got an Amiga in '88 and didn't see Scheme until I started using Linux in '95...there's never been a better time to learn software development), and I still found several things to learn from the coursework.

Find and download an Open Source project that does something you find interesting, and figure it out. Add a feature. A small one. Get it accepted by the developers. This will teach you a lot of skills you absolutely must have that aren't "programming": Revision control (because you'll need to work on the SVN or CVS or bzr or monotone version of the software in question), making patches (use "diff -u" for single-file changes or "diff -uNr" for whole directory changes), and communicating with other developers (you need a co-founder who is a stronger hacker than you, and you need for him or her to not be infuriated by the way you communicate with them...Open Source folks are generally happy to help if you're doing something useful for their project).

Notice I haven't mentioned any languages here. They're not irrelevant, but close to it. Some languages are better learning languages than others (Python, Ruby, PLT Scheme, which are all interactive and very clean), but if you can't see how to get started making something useful (almost) right away due to language choice, pick something else. All of the stuff you learn in the next few weeks is going to apply equally to pretty much all languages. If you do SICP, plus start working on some open source project (maybe in Ruby, Python, Perl, or PHP), you'll get to the meaty stuff right away.

Avoid hard problems (for now). Don't learn Java (you might make an exception for the ADUni Java courses--they teach programming and it just happens to use Java as the language, but it's way too easy to get mired in the minutiae of Java). Don't learn C. Don't learn Common Lisp. Don't learn edge cases in Perl or PHP (just the ones used in the Open Source projects you've picked to work on). Don't get bogged down reading standards documentation.

Do learn good tools. vim, emacs, or Eclipse. If you use a Mac, maybe TextMate. There is no other editor you should waste your time on, if you're in a hurry. Later on, you can flit between some of the others, if you feel dissatisfied with what you've landed on. Learn to use the UNIX command line tools, as you need them when you need them, to make yourself more productive. If ever you find yourself wishing there were an automated way to do something to several files (and you will), just remember that there is a UNIX tool that can do that for you (maybe sed, maybe awk, maybe perl, maybe grep, maybe diff, maybe patch), and set out to find what it is and how to use it. (Not using UNIX? mingw or Cygwin can help.)

Let me re-iterate something...if you're in a hurry, you must write a few lines of code today. Writing code is the single most useful thing you can do in learning to code.

Oh, yeah, for JavaScript, you cannot beat Douglas Crockford's awe-inspiring JavaScript videos at the Yahoo Developer Network.

Re: What is your recommended beginner's hacker training course?

#17
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-171Fall2003/CourseHome/index.htm

Philip Greenspun described this course as "how to build Amazon.com all by yourself"

the textbook is available on amazon here:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262511916/pgreenspun-20

The curriculum is not language specific so you'll also need a book on Lisp, Ruby-on-Rails, IIS/ASP.NET, Apache/Tomcat/Java, or whatever is your choice of technology.

Re: What is your recommended beginner's hacker training course?

#19
post #2

What is the fastest way to learn "hacking" to a reasonable level such that you can apply for YC? Of course, you need a product/idea to apply, but what will be the fastest way to acquire the necessary skill such that you can build a reasonably good product / to actualize your idea? Finding a hacker co-founder is a shortcut but it is not considered an answer here. I want to have a full schedule, e.g. firstly read this…

Basically, the way I learned it was something like:

1. Begin administering a message board and discover the need to learn HTML in order to avoid using the god-awful Microsoft Frontpage (awful in terms of generating unnecessary complexity).

2. Learn Java because I've always been interested in programming and it seems like a "hot" language.

3. Learn Javascript to make some elements of my webpages a little bit dynamic (on the client side, at least).

4. Begin a Computer Science major. The truth is that I really did not learn much from the class content itself, but from the projects we had to do, projects which involved a lot of independent work. So find some programming problem that seems interesting and program it in C/C++ (at least that's what I did :-).

5. Discover Lisp, code in Lisp, learn Lisp, vow to use nothing but Lisp (and maybe some Python) ever again.

6. Work for a company that uses nothing but a Unix environment (FreeBSD), and spend the summer upgrading to a new server. This involves looking at plenty of open source code in order to find out what's going on and why nothing is working right. Discover a loathing for PHP.

7. Install Linux at home. Learn Perl, and shell. Realize the amazing power of commands like find, xargs, and 'perl -e ...'. Note the convenience of having gcc and interpreters for Perl, Python, and Lisp at your fingertips.

8. Get started. The sooner you start programming, the sooner you will find yourself searching Google to figure out how to do x in language y. There is no easy road to hacking... you have to take the Nike approach. ("Just do it." Is that even their slogan anymore?)

Looking back, you could certainly avoid step 2. Step 4 is largely unnecessary as well, except that being forced to do projects is a good motivator to get you programming when you first start. If you can find your own motivation, then a CS major is not really much help. Step 5 is optional, but you should definitely learn something beyond the standard C/C++/Java that most people get stuck with. Step 6 was a great experience for me, coming from a strictly Windows environment, but skipping straight to Step 7 wouldn't hurt too much. I'm not trying to be a Linux zealot here, but open source, Unix-based platforms teach you a completely different way of thinking (problem-solution based) than the Windows mindset, and I think it's closer to the manner of thinking employed by your typical hacker.

Step 8 is the most important. Get started. Don't look for someone else to do your work for you. There is no substitute for hard work, so find something that interests you and start programming it in the language of your choice. If you only want to learn hacking in order to apply for YC, then you have already written yourself off as a non-hacker. Hacking is a means to an end in some ways, but not to that extent.

Re: What is your recommended beginner's hacker training course?

#20
post #2

What is the fastest way to learn "hacking" to a reasonable level such that you can apply for YC? Of course, you need a product/idea to apply, but what will be the fastest way to acquire the necessary skill such that you can build a reasonably good product / to actualize your idea? Finding a hacker co-founder is a shortcut but it is not considered an answer here. I want to have a full schedule, e.g. firstly read this…

Do you want to be a "hacker" or do you just wanna be able to build web apps. i dont think they are the same thing. I am not a hacker but I am learning to build Web Apps. For example I dont need to know how to build enterprise wide software. I spoke to a few friends of mine who can "hack". I said I wanna be able to build web apps they said learn the following and I am.

1. (X)HTML and CSS 2. A tiny bit of Javascript 3. PHP 4. MySQL 5. learn stuff on linux and servers

6. After that i am on my own, I figure I will learn Ruby on Rails after that. Ive given myself until January 2008 to be pretty good at 1-5. Lets see how it goes.

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