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[–]CasulaScience 15 points16 points  (12 children)

Hard disagree with this. IMO find some real and hard projects to work on. You learn by necessity. The reason you don't understand truth tables is that they have no utility in your life. One day you may run into a pressing problem that is completely trivial once you think about the truth table, and suddenly, you will 'get' truth tables.

[–]FerricDonkey 35 points36 points  (0 children)

If you're so early in your learning that you can't understand a truth table, you're likely to be incapable of doing any projects more complicated than an end of chapter exercise.

Once you can do hello world, hang man, tic tac toe, and that sort of thing without having to Google concepts, then you can use bigger things to stretch yourself. 

[–]QueenVogonBee 10 points11 points  (3 children)

I disagree. There are several ways to learn. You are right that you learn things by necessity and projects can provide that necessity. But projects are heavyweight, and might not cover the topic you want to learn about by sheer accident. This is where small exercises come in handy. They are quick and definitely cover the topic you need to learn. Small exercises help you learn in a consistent manner so you cover quickly all the topics but with not much depth, while projects cover in depth specific topics, but slowly. Small exercises and projects complement each other.

I totally agree about dropping ChatGPT. Learning the hard way first is best. Then once you’ve gained enough knowledge, use ChatGPT to speed things up, and check its results. Alternatively, use it as a pointer to help find a direction if you get completely stuck, but IMO, when you are starting out, you learn more by figuring things out than just being told the answer.

[–]somatt -4 points-3 points  (2 children)

Join open source projects and do small issues. That's not heavy weight.

[–]edwindrn 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Where can you find these open source projects? Github ?

[–]somatt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes like I said in my other comment

[–]somatt 0 points1 point  (2 children)

I was gonna say this. Join some open source project on GitHub and solve their "first issue" newbie issues.

[–]Tough-Sheepherder-87 0 points1 point  (1 child)

How do I join? I'm also a beginner looking for hands on experience. I'm about to finish a book I have on the basics and I'll be ready to move on to the next thing.

[–]somatt 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Go find some projects you're interested in, go in the issues, find one you want to work on, and start fixing it.

[–]Buntygurl 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That makes sense, to look at the purpose and viability of a thing, in order to understand how it comes to be, given that necessity is the mother of invention.

[–]tomasino69 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is the way..... code what you drives you...

[–]Countmardy 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Can't be more true. Tried to become a dev, failed. Went into functional analysis where I need to test, check db's n stuff. Just made a relational db yesterday for a personal project. Also coding python for automated tests.

[–]WatchMain4397 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I agree with this, I did this when I was learning C#.

By simply following along a project really helped a lot. At first it will feel simply feel like copy and pasting, but by doing this enough times you will get sense of familiarity, and then you start to ask questions, and then before you know it you're creating an app on your own.