How should I learn programming?

Re:How should I learn programming? by lowlyscientist on Saturday February 25, 2012 @07:32AM (#3632797)

Abelson-Sussman's SICP is a steep learning curve for an absolute beginner: I'd recommend reading How To Design Programs first (and SICP right after), which is similar but a bit more gentle. It also uses Scheme, but focuses most at how to think about programming problems, and general "design recipes" for solving them.

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Re:How should I learn programming? by drostie on Sunday February 26, 2012 @02:16PM (#3636466)

That may be very good advice; I haven't seen How To Design Programs.

While the SICP lectures do in fact have a ridiculously huge scope, I was also surprised when rewatching them -- mostly with how basic they were when they started. "Here's adding, here's subtracting, here's what a lambda is." One thing that's nice about SICP is that assignment is very consciously "added on later."

I wouldn't have expected them to be beginner material either, but then I met a nice gal named emma on Freenode's ##club-ubuntu IRC channel, who was using SICP to learn programming. I remember remarking that this must be very hard and she didn't understand why it should be.

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Re:How should I learn programming? by lowlyscientist on Saturday March 03, 2012 @09:25AM (#3660150)

That's true, I do recall skimming through the very early parts of SICP.

I'm jealous of Emma, I bet that would be a really strong base for building programming skills.

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