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Tales of coding from a beginner

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Re: Tales of coding from a beginner

#4
Question: I'm curious to hear other people's experiences with "4. Stop asking questions". I ask questions quite a bit. It does slow me down. But I feel like if I understand something, I can move faster in the longer term, besides the value derived from just understanding how the system/abstraction works.

Re: Tales of coding from a beginner

#5

Lesson One: Don't go on ##java@freenode and ask homework questions.

Probably not. Are there any welcoming IRC channels? I know of #phpmentors but what about for other languages?

From my experience it's the channels that don't have a lot of active members, maybe like 10 or 20 people logged in at all times. The value of conversation is increased majorly in those channels.

Re: Tales of coding from a beginner

#6
Personally, I've always read '=' as meaning the left hand side was equal to the right. So if I see

x = 5

then I'm already assigning the value of 5 to x, because they're equal! Does that make sense? Curious to see what others think, because before reading this article, I didn't even realize that was a particular tripping point for anyone looking to start programming.

Re: Tales of coding from a beginner

#7
> Equals is a lie: = ≠ =

This has occurred opposite to me while learning Mathematics. As a programmer, who has been learning fundamental mathematics from the past year, the whole assignment/equivalence thing screwed me up so many times.

Re: Tales of coding from a beginner

#9

Lesson One: Don't go on ##java@freenode and ask homework questions.

Probably not. Are there any welcoming IRC channels? I know of #phpmentors but what about for other languages?

Asking for mentoring and asking someone to do your homework are two different things. There's always been and there always will be freshmen who attempt to short cut their way through classes by trying to make someone else do solve their homework. It is and should be frowned upon.

Politely asking smart questions about how to progress in your homework, on the other hand, is just fine.

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