191–200 of 249 posts
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I don’t mind distractions when learning via books (I wouldn’t be able to finish my degree otherwise), but the other advices still apply. Reading a chapter without doing the exercices is like listening to a lecture without taking notes. You may understand a few things (or everything), but you’ll find that doing practice, drawing diagrams, or summarizing it lead to a deeper understanding. More often than not, you have…
As mentioned, I have ADHD. Which means I cannot handle distractions. So I try to uses processes and tools to manage distractions as much as possible for me. But I guess a neurotypical zoomer can code fine with a TV in the background, a podcast in one ear, insta and DMs ploinging into their notifications and slack nagging in the status bar. I cannot.
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Are you reading programming books the same way you would read a fiction book? If so, stop doing that. Programming or any technical learning is a hands on experience. Take notes and apply techniques, using pen-and-paper or the keyboard, as they are presented. If you really have to just "read" a technical book, IME a less-is-more approach works best. 5-10 minutes at a time, not even a chapter at once. Maybe a few parag…
I read about fifty books a year for a decade now. Only about four of them per year, are programming books. They are indeed to be read very differently. Here's how I read them, ymmv. - never in bed. never as audiobook. But sitting. At a table or desk. - no distractions. At most "focus music". - read a chapter through. Then read it again and do all excercises (on a computer without wifi) - make copious notes, highlight…
~ Yes, always do all the exercises. It's important how you do them. No copypasting. Enter all the code examples in your text editor of choice and run them if possible. Experiment liberally and don't be afraid of errors; instead, adjust the program in response to the errors. Create a directory and save all your files; don't just keep overwriting the same exercise. This is so you can go back and review if necessary.
~ If possible, always use the PDF formatted version of the book. EPUB and other formats too often don't look good and aren't formatted as the author(s) intended, and PDFs tend to be easier to follow because the page is formatted the same as the print version.
~ I use the Pomodoro technique of working intensely on the book for 25-30 minutes and then taking a short break before continuing. This tends to help me focus and retain more of the book.
Back when I was learning Python, I used two books in sequence, "Python Crash Course" by Matthes and "Think Python" by Downey. This turned out to be fortuitous, because until I started working through them I didn't know they are two completely different approaches: PCC teaches you how to program in Python and TP teaches you computer science using Python. Working through both books consecutively gave me a much better scope and understanding of the language to build on than using one book alone and stopping there.
How does Eloquent JavaScript compare with Horstmann‘s JavaScript for the Impatient?
Where is the physical copy of the 4th edition? I can't find it.
I learned JS from the second edition.
Incredible resource.
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Not that I think download metrics is the best metric to decide that, but even with that, flow-bin has almost half a million of downloads per day. That's far away from dead, at least in my world. And I'm guessing that doesn't count anything from Facebook as they most likely run their own registries.
flow-bin has substantially fewer downloads than coffeescript and both are declining. That is a dead project. https://npmtrends.com/coffeescript-vs-flow-bin
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I remember reading the first edition back in maybe 2011 when I decided I should sit down and actually learn JavaScript beyond the superficial grasp I had of it from working on web things (mainly via Rails at the time). What a great book, I learned so much from it at the time. For years after, whenever anyone told me they wanted to learn programming, I told them to pick up this book as a first introduction to it. Plus…
I don't think this is a good book for someone who wants to learn programming for the first time.
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If you want a video series that accomplishes a lot of the content in these books it's Will Sentance's Javascript: The Hard Parts.
Cheers Josh :)
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I meant in the context of writing code - you’ll never hear anyone refer to their “bindings”. It breaks down with the simple `let a = 22; let b = a` example where the tentacle/binding metaphor can lead to wrong intuition of why a change to the value of a is not reflected in b .
You're struggling due to a conflation of two concepts. Binding refers to associating a name with a value. Assignment is a case of binding, but not the only one; two other examples are positional arguments in a function signature, and ESM imports. A binding can be mutable (let assignment, function arguments) or immutable (const assignment, ESM import). Value mutability is orthogonal. You can mutably bind a primitive v…