Ask HN: Resources for people who already know how to code?

3 points·strombofulous··3 comments

A common issue I run into when trying to learn about new technologies (for example, machine learning) is that the material often assumes the reader doesn't know very much. This leads to a lot of time spent on basic things (like for loops or the basic memory management)

What do you guys use to learn about new technologies/languages? Kind of like learnxinyminutes but more in-depth.

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My favorite approach is a list of programs that you implement in every language. Hello world, guess a number, calculate primes, read CSV and do statistics on it, draw a turtle, whatever. Go by example and https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code are great.

There is a reason you wont find many such guides. For example, the programmers quick guide to machine learning looks like this:

Step 1: Download library X solving your specific need.

Step 2: Run library function Y on your data, this creates the model you need.

If you want to learn machine learning properly you need to go do a real course and learn the fundamentals. If not that is all you need to know. "How do I know what library to download or what function to run to get good results?" yeah, that is the hard part, a tutorial can't teach you this, go learn it properly in a university course or equivalent or spend a lot of time building experience if you want to be able to answer that.

Just start reading the documentation. Peruse it all, but read the important things in detail, and skip the blogspam tutorials. Sometimes, there's a good book, like "Learn yourself some erlang..." that you can go through that's very worth it, but mostly the raw API docs are best.

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