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Comment by athst | Hacker News Reader

This is a really great article. I didn't realize that Slate gave their journalists a month out of every year to do something like this.

I think the description of her initially trying to learn ruby is really instructive for everyone who wants more people to learn how to code. There are just simple things you don't think about that a beginner can really get hung up on. For example, why can't you enter code into a word processor? How do you run scripts? I don't think programming books do a very good job of explaining these types of things, even now. Zed Shaw's Learn X the Hard Way series is probably the best at it I've seen so far.

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One thing I do with my books is I actually meet up with beginners and watch them try to use it. It seems every time I do that I find something new I hadn't anticipated. Like recently I changed the first exercise of LPTHW to have screenshots of what they will literally see:

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/ex1.html

I met with a beginner and watched her go through the first exercise, and she didn't understand that she's needed to type "print" and not the line numbers. I talked her through it then realized if I just show a screenshot then people could step from literal thinking about the code blocks in the book to abstract thinking in one exercise.

Same for the terminal/powershell screenshots. People didn't get that they just type into powershell. They thought they had to run python, then type the powershell commands into the python REPL.

Doing this kind of "usability study" on my books, and having the comments on each exercise, has really taught me a lot.

Great job -- it really takes dedication to do this. I've been teaching python for several years to large roomfuls of google employees and I know this will make a huge difference. I'm often asked for python book recommendations and have started recommending LPTHW.

Another huge problem seems to be making the connection from files in the terminal to files in finder/explorer. Neither OSX or windows makes this intuitive.

How do you meet people interested in doing this?

People email me sometimes or ask, sometimes I mention I'm looking for someone on twitter. It's not as often as I'd like since I don't have a stable meeting place and coffee shops sort of suck.

I think you hit on one of the fundamental failings of education in general, in that the only ones qualified to do it by necessity forget what it's like to be learning. The kind of hands-on testing you do is, I think, both commendable and necessary if we are to improve the way we teach and learn.

I remembered when the first time I learn about Linux commands, I thought I had to type in the dollar sign.

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