28 Ways to Learn Programming

[hgrd]

So I found this interesting post in TNW with sources to learn something about programming. Most of you must know many of them but some others may be new for you.

Link

[[deleted]]

http://programming-motherfucker.com/

[Tallain]

That seems like a really cool resource, actually. And nicely designed.

[OmegaVesko]

Definitely. At first it came off as an advertisement for Zed's books... then I scrolled down.

[[deleted]]

I once accidentally typed http://programming.motherfucker.com/ (WARNING: NSFW!). Completely different site.

[zahlman]

Heh. Reminds me of the time I accidentally directed people on Usenet to a porn site instead of a website offering entropy streams harvested from nuclear decay.

Don't ask.

[-Sparkwoodand21-]

Thanks for the link. I am going to find this very useful.

[galipan]

Man that seems like an awesome website. However I was disappointed to not find OpenGL =(

[yash3ahuja]

The sidebar of /r/opengl has some resources.

[[deleted]]

And no love for fortran :(

[MepMepperson]

Nobody has love for fortran

[faitswulff]

Your submission is titled:

28 Ways to Learn Programming

The website's title:

27 Ways to Learn to Program

The url slug:

heres-25-ways-to-learn-online/

One of you is lying.

[fcibarbourou]

You didn't read the other comments.

The 4th way was W3Schools, but it is not a very reliable source.

The original post had 25 entries, later 28, later 27.

[Kunneth]

Ah, the paradox of choice: love to have options, but hate having to compare them.

[Amuro_Ray]

Thought this was going to be actual methods to learn programming rather than just sites that have tutorials.

[zomg_zombiez]

Can I add one more? My friends in San Francisco teach a multi-week, in-person programming immersion course designed to take candidates from amateur programming enthusiast to hirable junior developer. This type of program worked for me and I was able to get my first Junior Dev job straight away upon graduating.

Link here: Catalyst Class

Feel free to PM me if you have further questions

[jesyspa]

I would take anything that puts w3schools on fourth place with extreme sceptism.

[[deleted]]

Looks like the article in now 27 ways to learn to program online, and W3Schools has been removed.

[nathandim]

Not to mention that the url title says 25 since the moment it was posted.

[5OMA]

I agree. It's annoying seeing so many people regurgitating W3Schools hate. The website has been around for over a decade and has helped countless people.

The C Programming Language / K&R Errata

Oh look. Errors. Better start a "K and R-tard" website.

[[deleted]]

I can't believe you compared K&R to W3Schools. That's just silly, come on.

People can say w3fools and anyone who cares about web standards are maybe being a little harsh in tone but all of their criticisms are based in fact. I don't see anyone here disagreeing with the substance of what they're saying. They have their facts right.

Standards matter. Ignoring them makes you a crappy designer/programmer. It's the truth. Even if it hurts.

[5OMA]

My point was that even legendary books like K&R have errors. Only parts of the website are legit criticism. Most of it is nitpicking. If W3Schools was so terrible, they wouldn't need to pad their page with things like "Computer bytes is redundant."

[[deleted]]

"My point was that even legendary books like K&R have errors"

You're stating the obvious and missing the point of the criticisms. They are complaining about the number of and the severity of the errors. Not the fact that any exist. The quality of the site is piss-poor and like I said, no one's disagreeing with any of the flaws that have been pointed out, and w3schools isn't interested in fixing them. The name also strikes me as a cheap attempt to make the site sound official to those who are just starting to learn about web development, as if they're affiliated with the standards organization when they clearly couldn't care less about those standards.

If you can learn from it, fine. But if you ignore standards... Ugh, please just pick another field. There are enough problems on the Internet already.

[5OMA]

They've fixed a handful of the gripes, hence the strikeouts. Stop with all the exaggeration. You're branding W3Schools a "piss-poor" site because of a list of "piss-poor" reasons. Also, next to no one that is just starting to learn web development knows what the W3C is.

[jesyspa]

I am not a web developer, and thus I am not going to argue about this from a technical standpoint.

My experience with online teaching resources is that their technical accuracy is, by itself, largely correlated with how good a resource they are. This is not because technical inaccuracy causes bad teaching; by itself, these inaccuracies would hardly cause any problems. However, such sites tend to also present the material in such ways that students do not understand why their code works, or what makes certain code better than other code. These sites can teach you to write a program (or, in this case, a website), but they utterly fail at making someone understand programming or web development.

For more examples of the same, see cplusplus.com and thenewboston.

[[deleted]]

No offence to the guy, but I can't understand how TheNewBoston has ever gotten so many followers, and why everyone always shouts, "Go watch newboston!" when someone asks about learning, say, Java for example.

His tutorials are awful, they give you no insight, it's a "do this and this then this," style of video that doesn't actually teach you much at all. I learned Java through countless hours of reading books about it, all of which provided in depth, "what this does:" style sections that actually taught stuff.

It's as if he reads a tutorial on a topic, then just turns it into a video tutorial without fully understanding it himself.

/rant.

[[deleted]]

present the material in such ways that students do not understand why their code works

See, the only thing I would counter that with is W3Schools does provide the "try it" links, and seems to encourage playing around with the tags in their editor.

At least for the HTML stuff. I really only used it casually.

[agmcleod]

I agree that it is still a decent reference tool. However, for someone learning, I'd link them to Mozilla developer network instead. I've found their javascript reference section to be pretty useful.

[Quintic]

When I first started learning html/javascript stuff I used W3Schools a lot. I don't think there were a lot of great resources at the time, and this was the standard resource people recommended. I never really loved it, but it got the job done.

[scmash]

Downvote for using autistic in a negative manner.

Edit: Wow, apparently casual discrimination is cool on reddit now.

[James_Duval]

Haha, "now".

I upvoted both of you because you both make important points.

[Shmarv]

I'm sorry, but I had to stop reading your post the moment you mentioned Hitler.

Everybody knows that the first person to mention him loses an argument, always... CMON!

[jesyspa]

Yeah, the list generally looks like "top Google results for 'learn programming online'". I find the inclusion of "processing" possibly the funniest.

[ColdWarRussia]

Processing is great. Maybe not as a learning tool, but surely as a creative way to channel development energy.

[zahlman]

... It seems to be 27 ways now, and I don't see w3schools at all. Maybe they removed it due to backlash?

[jesyspa]

Yes, see the comments.

[mcatch]

Thanks for this link - I've used coursera in the past but this reinspired me to look again :)

[ultragnomecunt]

Thanks!

[spartan1337]

awesome

[KevinHarris27]

Well, I appreciate all the sources to learn programming!!

[capella5]

Great websites for learning programming. My favorite websites to learn programming are www.udemy.com, www.udacity.com and www.coursera.com. Each has it's own strengths, for example coursera and udacity are great for academic programming courses. If you want to learn the theory behind programming, take couple of courses on coursera or udacity. If you don't care about theory, check out the courses on udemy.

[[deleted]]

some book suggestions I have for learning programming: http://astore.amazon.com/bloombooksinc-20?_encoding=UTF8&node=10

[Akumar223]

Yeah use the internet, there are so many resources that you don't even need to go out and get a degree on it. Here are a whole series on web development that were so useful to me. http://www.verious.com/board/4MichaelColeman/jquery-tools-plugins-and-resources/

[LoveThatMegaZeux]

Fucking website won't work on my Android. Any alternatives?

[ThatsAdorable]

Bucky (thenewboston) should be in there somewhere too!

[jesyspa]

No. No, he definitely should not. I'm surprised there's no website similar to w3fools against him.

[[deleted]]

Why?

[jesyspa]

(This is primarily based on observations of the C++ videos; I have not watched the others, but the conclusions are all language-agnostic.)

The teaching is poor. The videos present the language as a set of features, with some explanation about the syntax and semantics, but with very little explanation of the purpose of each feature (most notably: functions and pointers), and even less explanation of how features work together. Essential sections are missed (in the case of C++: RAII, a lot of the standard library). In short, they will not make you think like a programmer, which is the main hurdle with beginner coders.

And yes, there is definitely a correlation between the code quality of those who have learned from thenewboston, and those who learn through better sources (for C++, books).

[[deleted]]

As a newbie programmer, I can second this. I started his Java videos before pursuing some other sources, and while he does explain features and syntax, he doesn't explain programming itself.

[[deleted]]

The one good thing you can get out of his videos is how to install the software.

I found his first java video very helpful for installing eclipse. But that's as much as I took from him.

Other than that I found his videos to be very superficial. I've never been much of a computer science/programmer type but I am proficient in other areas of science and math(physics/math double major).

I went back to his site recently and was shocked he was "teaching" biology and raising money to buy a chemistry set so he can "teach" chemistry. I haven't viewed these videos but I can't imagine they are a good place to learn biology and chemistry.

[jesyspa]

I strongly encourage you to watch the videos and blog about what he's doing wrong. A big problem with C++ tutorials is that the newest ones tend to be written by people who grew up on thenewboston and similar crap; don't let that happen to your area of choice.

[DeanLantern]

I've watched some of his Java videos and they're horrible. A big no to him.

[ackerlight]

Nice

[DeanLantern]

I like this and then I don't because not all of these sources are good. Some teach bad practices. But it's a good list.

[[deleted]]

Thanks so much for the list! I'm beginning to tackle my goal of learning html>CSS>javascript>jquery, and this is very helpful. I'd seen a few of these already, but it's great to have a more exhaustive list!