Ask HN: Non-technical people, how did you learn to code?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2995733

[1] Copy examples, and tweak them to understand how they work.

[2] Program a game or a puzzle. (Here I'm talking about a simple game like Tic-Tac-Toe, not a full-fledged PS3 of XBox game). Programming something that is purely for fun provides a lot of gratification and reward. The joy of seeing the result is what propels you in spite of the frustration of error and failure. Plus, since you're in control of the project, you can focus on the fun stuff and postpone or skip boring things. For example, have a go at writing a Sudoku solver, or Cryptoquote, or Mastermind.

I learnt to code at 14 after asking my GCSE ICT (as in, Word, Excel, and FrontPage—that's the sad state of IT education in the UK) teacher what the "header files" I saw in the Deus Ex SDK were. He introduced me to Java, and, to be very cliché, the rest is history.

The main "textbook" I read was "Introduction to Programming Using Java"[1] (then in its fourth edition), which goes at a very easy pace and explain things well (I love this book, maybe its the nostalgia goggles but I'll never forget it and what it taught me). I'll add that I didn't have the Internet at home at the time; I had only a handful of resources to help me and all problems I encountered I had to solve by myself. Very "grindy".

If I were to start over, I'd probably go for a much nicer language such as Python, and use its tutorial[2] as well as Mark Pilgrim's Dive Into Python[3][4], and then move onto Django.

Basically, the best way to code is by coding—think of something to build, then build it, ideally trying a different way. Remember to read documentation and other (ideally smarter) people's code and follow (and, importantly, try to understand the reason of) best practices.

[1] http://math.hws.edu/javanotes/ [2] http://docs.python.org/tutorial/ [3] http://diveintopython.org/ [4] http://diveintopython3.org/