i have a huge problem with this, between HN, /r/programming, /r/netsec, /r/technology, fastcompany, I find myself not really "doing" that much with programming as a hobby. I studied computer science in college, and for the last 3 years have been working in the military outside the field, but my passion still lies with computer science. Unfortunately these days it seems I mostely read into the success of others.
I guess a lot of it was getting burned out on tutorials, I have a hard time completing them, because the thrill of programming for me lies in solving a new problem, not typing in someone else code. It has been hard for me to pick up rails even with the excellent rails tutorial just because I dont find it all that exciting to type in verbatum code. Anyone have any good suggestions for learning new languages?
I think that just starting small scope projects and adding to them incrementaly with some good ref materials might be the solution.
That's what I'm grappling with right now myself, I've assembled a hefty doc's worth of links to useful resources I've found, and I've got a small library of programming books I've bought lately.
For the holidays, my current plan is to go through a chapter a day of the programming books. Not just read through it, but actually do the example projects, retyping out the code line by line, understanding both the big picture and seeing if there's any gaps in the code that I don't understand. Actually try to experiment afterwards, try to build on top of smaller projects and put them together.
What about http://rubykoans.com/ for learning Ruby? You'll be following TDD, meaning the code should work if all the tests pass. And you learn incrementally as new test cases pass (or koans, as the case may be). I'll venture to say that once you have a grounding in the fundamentals, it'll be much easier to just read the advanced tutorials and understand it.
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i have a huge problem with this, between HN, /r/programming, /r/netsec, /r/technology, fastcompany, I find myself not really "doing" that much with programming as a hobby. I studied computer science in college, and for the last 3 years have been working in the military outside the field, but my passion still lies with computer science. Unfortunately these days it seems I mostely read into the success of others.
I guess a lot of it was getting burned out on tutorials, I have a hard time completing them, because the thrill of programming for me lies in solving a new problem, not typing in someone else code. It has been hard for me to pick up rails even with the excellent rails tutorial just because I dont find it all that exciting to type in verbatum code. Anyone have any good suggestions for learning new languages?
I think that just starting small scope projects and adding to them incrementaly with some good ref materials might be the solution.
That's what I'm grappling with right now myself, I've assembled a hefty doc's worth of links to useful resources I've found, and I've got a small library of programming books I've bought lately.
For the holidays, my current plan is to go through a chapter a day of the programming books. Not just read through it, but actually do the example projects, retyping out the code line by line, understanding both the big picture and seeing if there's any gaps in the code that I don't understand. Actually try to experiment afterwards, try to build on top of smaller projects and put them together.
What about http://rubykoans.com/ for learning Ruby? You'll be following TDD, meaning the code should work if all the tests pass. And you learn incrementally as new test cases pass (or koans, as the case may be). I'll venture to say that once you have a grounding in the fundamentals, it'll be much easier to just read the advanced tutorials and understand it.