Wow, thanks for posting that link. I’m really glad the ‘learning by doing’ methodology is under some scrutiny, because it’s not the way I learn at all. For what it’s worth, if I had come across the draft of Zed’s book when I was first learning to program, I suspect I would have hated it, very quickly gotten bored, and dropped it in favor of something else. I can’t stand being presented with the absolute minimal amount of explanation required for something. Glossing over the details is the quickest way to lose my interest. I need a complete, in-depth explanation, even if I don’t necessarily understand it all at first; I will come back later and re-read parts because I know exactly where the explanation was.
Another thing that I think would have especially bothered me about this book is that there are exercise upon exercise without answers. I remember being in algebra class in high school and hating that the book didn’t provide an answer to every single exercise; without an answer, doing the exercises was almost completely useless to me because I had no idea whether I had solved them correctly.
Hacking away at something until it works with minimal explanation is certainly one way to learn, but when I’m first learning something, as a novice, that particular methodology just makes me frustrated and angry. I could go into my garage and fiddle with my car’s engine for weeks on end trying to figure out how things work, but that seems like a largely inefficient way to go about learning. There are people who know how a car engine works that can communicate their knowledge to me—after all, isn’t that the whole point of instruction and education: somebody has already figured it out, and they can explain it to you quicker than it takes for you to figure it out yourself.
This isn’t to say I can’t now hack away at something in the dark and probe it to figure out how it works—I suspect that’s a necessary skill for being a good programmer. But learning how to program initially through such a method would not have been ideal for me.
That being said, I think there’s still a lot to be said about the straightforward, practical programming advice Zed throws out. In particular his explanation about the importance of noticing minor differences is really awesome. Obviously people have different personal learning styles, and I suspect this book is geared to those who learn like Zed, so I don’t doubt it would be valuable to those people. I definitely don’t learn like this, though, and I just wanted to point that out.