Ask HN: Has anyone learned programming entirely from watching videos? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Has anyone learned programming entirely from watching videos?

4 pointsOnixelen15 comments

You learn by using it. Videos, books, etc. are good as a starter but to actually learn it you need to experiment, do exercises and preferably use what you exercised in a real project, something you care about.

So, do you mean that at no point you actually write code?

Best site for beginning coders : starts with a video then has a "video" of coding that you can pause and interact with. Very friendly and simple to start with.

It is a good language to start with too.

https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming/p...

I was implying that you write code and you practice/try things out as you're watching. Sorry should have explicitly mentioned that.

You learn by doing. If thats implied, then the medium through which baseline knowledge is delivered doesn't matter much. Pick the one that you get along with. If that's videos over books, so be it.

Ideally, you would watch videos from an intro course at stanford or MIT. Those are known for uploading such lecture series.

JS is NOT a good language to start with.

Its a fast way to get a job. Its an obstacle in understanding programming. Have to know what you want out of this.

js as taught on kahn is c-like and visual. It's approachable and garbage collected.

Learning languages need to be simple and friendly, not practical. Not saying that they shouldn't understand the full stack eventually.

A first course in programming needs to teach you the principles. It doesn't need to be practical or easy or simple or any other nonsense.

If you don't understand pointers, you won't ever amount to much. Better to at least be aware that there's something important that you don't get than to be lulled into this "js everythings a mess and its ok that way" nonsense.

You can learn a lot from videos, but you'll need to apply it buy doing actual coding in the form of exercises and projects.

Also, depending on what kind of programming you want to do, you'll likely be working with a lot of tools for which no good video learning resources exit, which is why is is very important to be able to read and understand developer documentation and source code.

It depends what do you mean by that. I don't think you can actually learn something just by watching other people doing it, but online courses are a good start. I started to learn programming from an online Ruby on Rails course, then I created my first website (something like 9gag) and landed my first job after a couple of months. It happend to be a small company that has later created a mobile app that we managed to scale from 0 to over 100M users. I was even a main backend guy in there for some time. So yeah, watching videos might definitely be a good start, but I'd say the actual "learning" is a long process and requires lots of attention.

How did you land this job?

Found them online and applied via e-mail :)

Some people even learned using books :)

I have. I built a career from watching Jeffrey Way talk about php and javascript years ago. He has a video site called Laracasts now. Videos are a good way to start, but you have to love it to be good at it. Don't listen to language purists. Start with what you like.

> I have. I built a career from watching Jeffrey Way talk about php and javascript years ago.

This is what I need to hear.

Practice makes perfect and helps you in memorization as well.

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