Re: [dev] Suckless Way to Learn How To Program

* Brandon LaRocque <larocque.brandon_AT_gmail.com> [2010-08-13 18:20:17 -0400]:
> My son is interested in computer programming, and given the way that
> programming is being taught, I don't think it's the right way to go
> about learning.What would you guys here suggest for a self-learning
> curriculum that I could set up for him? By this, I mean languages,
> ideas, projects. I would really appreciate any help in the matter.

i pondered about how to learn programming myself and started
collecting links to answer it
http://port70.net/~nsz/00_prog.html
looking back now it seems like a random collection of things

i think the hard part of preparing useful course material is
to provide interesting and motivating problems with increasing
difficulty and challenges (which depends on personal taste and
changes over time, playing with qbasic used to be exciting but
i would not go back there now)

sicp used to be the basic book for teaching programming as
well as the k&r book for teaching c, however i'm not sure how
much do these motivate children nowadays (these books still
give a good understanding of a programming language and the
ways to build abstractions in relatively few pages)
the software stack got so many layers over time that the good
old low level introductions do not give a clear insight into
current systems (web, 3d, etc) which are probably the most
interesting topics right now

the advice that kernighan gives is

  No matter what, the way to learn to program is to write code,
  and rewrite it, and see it used, and rewrite again. Reading
  other people's code is invaluable as well.
Received on Sat Aug 14 2010 - 01:27:45 CEST