The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books • Hacker News Board

Re: The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books

#101

Post by yesenadam » Fri, Feb 16, 2018, 8:45 PM UTC

thro1237 wrote: post #83

mzzter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of this article: https://medium.com/@markpapadakis/interesting-codebases-159f... A curation of good codebases by someone who studies a lot of them.

He lost me when he said this: "Tensorflow: This is the finest Google codebase I ‘ve studied. Great design, very high quality code, and easy to understand how everything fit together." Tensorflow is the worst code you can learn from a library design perspective.

Why is that? (I know nothing about it, just would love to hear why you say that)

Re: The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books

#102

Post by kaycebasques » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 3:40 AM UTC

Mildly related: here’s a post I wrote about applying Charlie Munger’s principals of effective education to technical documentation: https://wordsmithweekly.com/blog/effective-education

Re: The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books

#103

Post by travmatt » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 4:58 AM UTC

tombert wrote: post #69

I'm actually not entirely sure how I learned how to program (I'm self-taught); I doubt it was just "one magic thing", but I am a big believer in the "learning-by-doing" approach for this kind of stuff. If I recall, I think the thing that made everything stick was me reading through one of those "Sams: Teach Yourself C in blah days", then downloading Code::Blocks and making a very simple OpenGL application involving b…

I’m much the same and I always feel odd trying to answer that question. I learned programming by immersing myself in the subject and trying and reading and talking about as much as I could. There was never a magic bullet, besides the fact that the returns on persistence began to compound.

Re: The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books

#104

Post by mercer » Sat, Feb 17, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

firasd wrote: post #51

I think a good learning trick that's an intermediate point between the two approaches he discusses (copying the sample code vs. closing the book and write the code yourself) is to write a different program based on what you can see in the sample code. That's how I learn tech myself--I already have some other project in mind, so I rarely sit down to build 'sample' apps with any sincerity. I try sample code to the exte…

What I like about languages with REPLs is that I can just copy-paste stuff and then muck about at various points of execution to get an idea of how things work, or prod at the different parts.

Re: The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books

#105

Post by HiroshiSan » Sun, Feb 18, 2018, 4:07 AM UTC

yesenadam wrote: post #100

HiroshiSan wrote: post #89

One thing I haven't seen mentioned in the article or the comments is that the Franklin Method is just deliberate practice applied to writing.

It's not clear what you mean "just deliberate practice". He was imitating a style he liked, trying to acquire to ability to write like that. Using the method in programming seems different, in that it's not the particular writer's unique style you're trying to acquire, but other things.

Deliberate practice as defined by K. Anders Ericsson.