I’ve been coding for years in a multitude of languages, but other than one c class I had in college I mostly learned through osmosis, or learned new things as they were needed.
So my knowledge is honestly all over the place and with a ton of gaps.
I’m trying to learn rust and starting going through The Rust Book and afterwards I plan on going on Rust by Example and trying to code my stuff as strictly following best practices as possible.
Is that a waste of time? I mean rawdogging it has been working for me for a decade now. Should I just yolo and write what I wanna write in Rust and learn as I go?
It depends on what you want to learn. One book won’t teach you everything there is to know about a language.
Decide on what area of the language you want to learn more about and then try to find a book that focuses on conveying that.
Otherwise you may spend a bunch of time learning something you don’t care about. You don’t need to know everything about a language unless you have a specific reason for why you want or need that knowledge.
The depth you go into a language will dictate where you need to go to gain the knowledge you’re seeking, if that makes any sense.
A simple 2-3 hour breeze through online documentation may be all that you need to get by. Or maybe a deep dive into serialization is needed because the kind of project you’re on and therefore finding a few books on that subject will be required.
I think it comes down to how you learn. I’ve found programming books useful because I tend to learn quickly from books. I know others do not. Regardless, if I’m reading a programming book, it is usually nearby a computer where I can try stuff out. At the end of the day, the time at the keyboard will be time well spent when learning a language.
Exactly. I know I learn the best from reading. I’ll read the book, do the exercises, then reread the book after a while. The first pass I pick up some of it, and the second pass I pick up a lot more detail. Once I’ve built the mental model
Yes. I think it’s massively useful to learn coding in a structured manner. And books will do that. I usually read at least one chapter at a time and then try to apply it. Either myself, or do the attached assignments. Plus it’s relatively fast to learn with proper material. You don’t need to search for the information yourself, they’re in the correct order and you’re unlikely to run into some dead ends because you missed some more fundamental knowledge (if you taught it yourself pretty randomly).
If I already know things, I just read a few more chapters at a time. That’s also some nice thing with books (in my opinion) you can read them as slow or fast as you like.
Reading programming language books isn’t a waste of time. What is a waste of time, is delving into a programming language and finding out how little of use it is. You’d hate yourself for pursuing a programming language and find out that it has little purpose.
The point of programming however, is to be versatile. Do not be content. You may focus on one or two programming languages, but there are jobs and fields out there that’s going to require more programming languages so you might want to keep a head up on that.
But no, reading programming books is not a waste of time. Just do not expect one book to answer everything. There’s a reason why there’s tons of editions of C/C+ for example. There is something new to document and learn about with that programming language.
God I hate learning by books.
I need a series of solution walkthroughs I can follow along with, until I get a solid foundation.I read programming books the way my wife reads cookbooks.
I first started from just reading “teach yourself” books. But I would say most of the actually useful shit I learned was just by sheer brute force fucking around with my own things and learning by doing.
Yeah I’ve only learned at work by bashing my head against the wall whilst complaining about bad documentation
The Rust Book helped me realize that I wasn’t likely to just learn Rust by doing as I had done with many other languages. I fucking love Rust but it is a bit of an oddball and the book is a great way to start.
In my opinion, once you have learned the basics (and a few advanced topics) of programming, you are already 40-50% into learning any other new programming language. If you feel reading a book is a waste of time, skim it to learn the syntax while you work on projects and come back to it when you are stuck on something. Also programming books often have sections about best practices and common mistakes, make sure not to skip those.
Yeah when I swap between languages these days I usually just google some form of “cheat sheet” and hope some college kid made one I can reference
The last one I have read was “Java in 21 days”, when I had some spare time between jobs.
Already decades ago… The last one before that was the API reference of Windows 3.1 :)
Today I start a new topic or language with a few youtube tutorials (when I have time) or just with ChatGPT (when I don’t have time).
Anki for practicing recall and a lot of practice. Tons of daily practice. Build as many things as you can. Build for fun. Build to use the tools given by the language. Build unoptimized slop to experience first hand why it’s normally not done.
I rely on Anki heavily so that the book content sticks around in my head. Do it long enough and you’ll be able to recall entire books bit by bit.
Identify the gaps in your knowledge and plug em with books and courses. Reading books without practicing recall and worling on your own projects might be a waste of time. I personally don’t think it is if it’s fun.
so how long do you retain this anki-knowledge?
After I had learned programming well enough to do it comfortably in a few different languages, the return on investment for reading most common programming books declined sharply and since then the only programming books I still read are of a very specific kind and the very best of those still remains The Practice of Programming by Kernighan & Pike which still remains a greatly educational and relevant book today, 25 years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming
I think related/similar languages can be picked up on the fly, but if (for example) you’re only familiar with object-oriented languages, you need a more comprehensive introduction to your first functional language.
If we’re talking about programming language guides in particular, following a guided introduction to a new language was helpful to me, when I was introduced to new concepts and perspectives. And Rust is the best example in my case. Personally I probably would’ve struggled more and longer in practice without learning about ownership, lifetimes and borrowing in theory first, because it’s an essential part of almost anything, even strings, and yet it’s not too difficult to understand in theory.
But at the end of the day, you can start rawdogging it and use the Rust book or any other guide, when you’re facing a roadblock. If you do so, please share your experience.
A coworker from Alabama once told me that programming is like kissing your sis: you can’t get better at it by reading books, you have to try and make mistakes to learn
