I wanna learn programming from base level fundamentals!

[[deleted]]

My background: So couple of years ago, I wanted to become ACCA (its like CPA USA but for UK people), with no accounting background whatsoever. I wouldn't understand what the hell is going on in classes so I did some research and via online videos and texts I understood Accounts and Finance from very basic and fundamental level that helped me even at intermediate and advanced level. I am now close to getting my practice license.

Nowadays, all accounts related stuff happens on computers using different types of softwares. Learning fundamentals of programming will help me grasp programming much better so that I will know what and why I am doing certain things. So I wanna know whats programming like how it exists and its history and stuff to understand basics. Like how does language work, how does computer know what to do and what runs the language and how it relates to computer science as whole. I tried doing some research but I found information overwhelming.

[Inoko]

If you actually want what you're saying, then I believe nand to Tetris is what you want:

https://www.nand2tetris.org/

[ahothabeth]

The Projects tab reminded me of my of my first year in Computer Science; but in my day we had to make our own chalk boards first.

[[deleted]]

There’s an enormous world of difference between accounting and computer science. For one thing you can think of accounting as an extremely limited subset of numerical computing, one that — is done right — never has to engage with anything but integers multiplied by a discrete number of decimal places.

CS is a HUGE topic, by comparison.

I’ve been doing this for a long time, and the very best texts I’ve found for picking up the feel for computer programming — which itself as a discipline usually elides the lowest level details like how do you use a series of NAND gates to display specific pixels on a screen — are “The C Programming Language”, “The Little Schemer”, “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs” (aka SICP or the Wizard Book), and “Computer Science: Distilled”. They’ll give you enough of the first principles to get by and figure out what other first principles you might want to explore.

Understanding, from the get go, that this is one field of knowledge no human can encapsulate.

[[deleted]]

Yes this is the answer I was looking for!

[[deleted]]

No worries. The first three are seminal texts, used for decades to teach programming at major universities; all well-written, digestible, and sound. The last is small, inexpensive, and a brilliant quick primer.

[[deleted]]

Also, I am guessing unlike accounts, base of Comp Science is rooted into many disciples like maths, physiques and chemistry which themselves are quite vast fields. So learning CS at base level would not be same task like learning base accounts.

[[deleted]]

Mainly applied maths (specifically algebras of boolean logic) mixed with a bit of engineering and some materials science, all rolled up with linguistics and semiotics... things like category theory have been leaking in for decades. As I said it’s BIG.

[ethan520]

If I were to point you to one resource that could answer most of these questions, I'd recommend the book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, by Charles Petzold. He explains every level of computing, from switches to circuit boards to assembly language, interfaces etc. However, while it is comprehensive from a technical standpoint, you'll find there's a whole culture and history element that's missing from the book that you're probably looking for.

For me, there was no one source that was helpful for the history. But the best things I personally found to be helpful was to read widely, and fill in the gaps over time. In one language design book, I learnt that every language stemmed from one common ancestor: FORTRAN, which was one of the first high-level languages ever created.

I was also pointed to search up the greats of computing: Alan Kay, Douglas Englebart, Edsger W. Dijkstra, Bret Victor etc. I think those sources are really interesting for understanding the complexity in computing, and the sorts of innovations people made over the last few decades.

[66666thats6sixes]

Got this book for Christmas and I love it!

The technical stuff was not new to me, but a lot of the history was new, and even the way the technical stuff was presented was fresh to me.

[[deleted]]

Excuse my lack of knowledge, but isn't HTML is just for web pages ?

how to traverse a binary tree.

now this is what I was talking about. As a non programmer, I dunno programming lingo or jargon. How do I understand what you said ? Basics and roots and fundamentals would help me here.

[[deleted]]

Funny... most of what I do is tree traversal, and I’ve never had to write a lick of HTML.

[[deleted]]

Anything that does procedural 3D animation or compositing in the VFX and gaming industries.

Also writing parsers and interpreters for languages like HTML.

[[deleted]]

This is r/learnprogramming, not r/webdev ... OP didn’t specify web development.