Ask HN: Good beginner programming course that is practical? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Good beginner programming course that is practical?

I'm looking for a good beginner programmer course for my wife and a friend of mine that want to learn programming.

Any reccomendations?

Paid or free?

I have looked at allot of courses. Probably the best is Automating Boring stuff with Python, but its Python.

I'm looking for a really easy to follow course that is really practical, but isn't python.

Preferably Javascript or something else. I remember when I first tried to learn programming I found that most beginner courses weren't very beginner friendly at all.

Please don't tell me to tell them to teach scratch. I want something applicable to everyday life yet where they can still learn fundamentals.

View on HN

Absolutely number one course is CS 50 from Harvard:

https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computer-science-har...

If you talk about beginner course - you need to cover the basics, knowing what are memory pointers, will make you a better programmer even if you use languages, which you don't need to explicitly use memory allocation. The course covers basic of everything and gives you a base to set of in any direction.

There are quite a few exercises in CS50 that use Python, but at that level is more of tool to practice writing decent code logic.

I would say that the course is extremely beginner friendly, but gets to a good depth as it progresses.

I agree that Python might not be useful as JavaScript to ship things quickly to public via website. In that case I used an online version of the book to get general basics of JavaScript in the pure Vanilla form:

https://eloquentjavascript.net/

Eloquent JavaScript also start slowly with some basics specific to JavaScript, but quickly moves on to all the essential caveats core features of JavaScript. There are also good interactive exercises for each chapter

Afterwards you are ready to jump into the world of React/Vue tutorial on YT ;)

Wow thanks that eloquentjavascript looks amazing. I might just read it myself!

Yes, that one gets really into the weeds. It was especially great for me to comprehend the promises model in JS.

Agreed on CS50. Seconded.

The Pharo MOOC is great. It was my introduction Smalltalk-style OOP programming. The focus of the small project along the course is web development using Pharo, but I hope they eventually create a version geared towards data science using PolyMath and Roassal. Pharo reminds me of that famous William Gibson quote: "The future is already here—It’s just not very evenly distributed". See https://mooc.pharo.org/ and also https://books.pharo.org/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com