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Comment by mixmax | Hacker News Reader

I'm rather new to programming, but sometimes there's good advice to be had from people that are just starting out - they don't take things for granted. Anyway, here's my list:

- How to think. If you can't hold abstract thoughts in your head you should find something other than programming to do.

- How to learn. Progrramming is a dynamic and often changing discipline. You must know how to learn new stuff.

- How to find information. Programming is such a vast field that no matter what you do you'll often come across something you don't know. 99% of the time someone else has had the exact same problem, and the solution is out there if you know how to find it.

If you know how to think, learn and find information everything else will follow.

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How to find information is a skill that is no longer just for librarians, that's rapidly becoming a 'must have' skill for just about every job.

If you don't know how to effectively search for information that is already available out there then you are probably wasting valuable time re-inventing various wheels.

If there is one thing I would do if I had a company with employees of any kind it would be to teach newcomers in a couple of hours the finer points of using search engines and other online resources.

You're absolutely right - interesting point.

A friend of mine is a diesel truck mechanic, which to me seems like a job that doesn't have much to do with the Internet. Yet he spends lots of time researching and finding information. When he debugs engines that don't work the Internet is his first stop. Just like in programming there's always someone somewhere that's had the same problem and he's usually able to find it in some obscure place.

> How to find information is a skill that is no longer just for librarians, that's rapidly becoming a 'must have' skill for just about every job.

And don't forget about asking librarians, either. Some research librarians are so good at finding things, it's scary. They're like meta-meta-search engines, except they're usually much better at teasing the relevant details out of vague questions.

Meta-meta-search engine is such a great descriptor. I have worked in a library for 4 years now and that is the best explanation of a librarian I've heard.

It would be quite nice if there were a service half-way between Ask Jeeves and Mechanical Turk, where any query you entered would be passed to a librarian, who would reply with an optimized search string (with the option of starting a chat with you to "tease the relevant details out.")

Being new to the field, you've proved to be astute. Anyone who can do those things earnestly will do just fine.

Historical note: there was a time when you could retain everything in the field, and it was around the time I was taking home more than ten trade rags a week that I decided that a new tactic was required: where to find information. That was well before the Internet, of course. And now we have it, it is a fantastic resource for us. Geez! Complete lumps of working code. It's too easy :)

- How to think. If you can't hold abstract thoughts in your head you should find something other than programming to do.

I agree that proper methods of thinking and holding abstract thoughts is necessary to program well, in fact it is probably the most necessary criteria. But if you cannot do that the answer is not to give up on programming (if you want to program), but to learn to think and reason abstractly.

And programming is good for practising abstract reasoning.

Could you explain a little bit more about #1? What would an example of holding an abstract thought in your head be?

There is a big difference between a new (so-called must-have) skills and essential skills.

All knowledge that you really must have is already developed long ago (look at things like SICP or Mythical Man Month, or XP Explained) and remains unshaken.

In contrary, this or that new cool tool to make a dynamic web-pages, or a brand new pile of a useless abstractions in the next revision of J2EE or .NET are third-rated knowledge. Google search is enough in this case.

Take a look at Berkeley's CS 61A course (with that honorable old-school lecturer and a nostalgic 80x24 text-mode console on Solaris 2.7) - all the essential knowledge is here.

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