Comment by BorisMelnik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BorisMelnik | Hacker News Reader

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I was in a similar predicament (not prison) where I had zero access but wanted to continue to hone in on my skills.

My advice is to learn something like HTML/CSS.

It is really easy to read and understand. Send him a "before and after"

Sheet 1: some b, i, title, font, etc tags marked up in HTML with data

Sheet 2: the "after" sheet of what it looks like rendered

Each week the remote student will be tasked with writing out a basic website. He / she sends in his work to the teacher that inputs the data (bonus points for OCR.)

The teacher sends back the rendering along with the next lesson plan.

From there you can go into CSS. Javascript would be a little harder but think how advanced you can get at HTML/CSS in a few years?

Being that I already had knowledge, I took time to hone in on more theoretical skills such as UX and read a ton of books related to user experience, business, etc.

That would also reinforce the importance of checking things work first time. With the rapid feedback we get now, the temptation to hack away gets in the way of properly understanding and predicting what the effect of the changes will be.

HTML is not computer science.

Why isn't it? I'd say as a markup language, it touches on a lot of computer science topics: data structures, semantics, abstraction, etc. Also, I think it's a great entry point that could lead to an interest more "serious" CS topics.

http://blog.acthompson.net/2013/03/html-and-computer-science...

http://supercomputerscience.blogspot.com/2012/07/html-is-not...

Completely agree - it's an incredibly easy first step in understanding the abstraction of code -> results.

I've actually had the privilege of walking a recently released inmate with 0 computer skills through the process of writing their first lines of html. The excitement he experienced seeing "hello world" transform just by changing it to "<h1>hello world</h1>" was incredible. I think it boils down to realizing the power of - to put this in the simplest terms possible: "typing some jargon and making things happen."

the point of this entire post is not to argue semantics. this inmate wants to get involved with programming, and the best way to start (in my opinion) is to pursue HTML.

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