Learning a programming language

My advice to anyone learning a new programming language is always the same: get the best book out there, read it, do the exercises, and then build some program with it.

“Tutorials” and such might be nice if you’re only looking to adjust an existing program in an unfamiliar language, or just want to get the general flavour of the language before actually investing too much time in to learning it, but they are almost always inadequate to truly teach a language. Learning a language is more than just learning the syntax, but also learning best practices, idioms, common pitfalls, etc. Tutorials usually don’t give you that, and only give you syntax (and usually do a mediocre job at that, too).

Learning practical skills is not about reading but about doing. Only reading about carpentry will not make me a carpenter. Of course it’s important to learn about the appropriate techniques, but only actually practising what I’ve read will teach me to be a carpenter. This is why you should do the exercises and write a program. Even writing a comparatively simple program will help solidify your skills. I encourage people to write real actually useful projects as soon as they’re able, which help with motivation as well as solidifying the new knowledge.

Taking notes while reading the book also helps. I always write down key concepts while I’m reading about them in brief notes. I don’t often refer to them, it’s just useful to write things down in your own words to help your brain memorize them (also see Why write?)

For example an excerpt in my notes for Go:

Strings
-------

    // utf-8 by default
    s := "€e"

    // But many operations operate on bytes, and not characters:
    fmt.Println(s[0:3])

    // Array of runes
    x := []rune(s)

    // Array of bytes
    y := []byte(s)

    // Unlike strings these are not immutable!
    y[3] = 'X'
    x[1] = 'X'
    fmt.Println(s, string(x), string(y))  // €e €X €X

    // 8364, 226
    fmt.Println(x[0], y[0])

    // €
    fmt.Println(string(x[0]))

    // Useful packages:
    // bytes, strings, strconv, unicode
    // var buf bytes.Buffer

    // Convert
    s := string(byteArray)

Do remember that programming books are like most things in life: 90% of them are crap. Some of them – even popular ones – can be truly terrible, and the best book for you also depends on personal preference and your prior knowledge of programming (e.g. some books assume prior basic programmer knowledge).

So please do take some time researching which book to buy; ask on reddit, or the Stack Overflow chat. Usually experts in the language have a pretty good idea what the good and bad books are.

A common question people new to programming ask is “what language should I learn?”

As long as you stick to one of the mainstream languages it matters little. While there are large differences between languages, the basics are fairly universal, and without any experience it will be hard to judge your personal preferences. It’s like picking your favourite music genre without ever having listened to music.

That being said, I generally recommend Python, as it’s a good general purpose language with a helpful and positive community. But if you think C#, Java, PHP, Ruby, C++, JavaScript, or something else better fits your needs or preferences then by all means go for it.