Ask HN: How do you learn by doing?

As a learner/worker/human being, the ideal place to be is what is called a state of "flow", where the challenges you have in front of you are neither too trivial but also not too insurmountable. You want something to challenge you but also not something that will leave you completely lost.

So, my advice is to just flip your process. Take whatever you are learning -- be it through a book, a tutorial you are following, etc. -- and then once you feel confident you've learned some discrete new chunk of skill, try making something on your own that leverages it. But just something that you feel could be accomplished with roughly the skillset which you now believe you have. The best projects follow the mold of "I'm pretty sure I could do [x] now, but I'm not sure."

For instance, if you are learning some framework like Angular, a bad place to start would be "I want to make a real-time chat app". But as you are working through a tutorial, once you learn how to just literally put a stateless component on the screen, you might get to a stage where you feel comfortable just putting another one on the screen that does something slightly differently. Sweet, you got that down. Then, later on, you'll be introduced to managing routes; so if the tutorial you are following is a simple app that shows phones and details of the phones, make one that can show books and a collection of reviews of the books and maybe a link to where you could buy it on Amazon. And on and on and on...

In this way, you are always checking for understanding by doing and can figure out where your knowledge is poor, but never dabbling into things that you have no proper mental scaffolding for which just turns into copying and pasting code you don't understand.

I just pointed him to the relevant passages in my old text books, and he more or less did it himself. I helped him with one of the harder ones he had been banging his head against, but that was more of a language problem than not understanding.

I am pretty darn impressed.

That's not learning by doing that's learning by copying. :) I don't think learning by copying works which is why your approach is flawed.

Next time try this instead. Google it, find some code, read it and try to understand it like you do now. Then don't copy it. Instead open it in a text editor window and in another you rewrite the code. If you don't know how to rewrite it, just do it character by character.

Now you might say "that's just a slower form of copy-paste!" but no, it is not. After a few times trying this, you will see why it isn't. It is the method I use and it works for me.

I make the same project every time I pick up a new language.

It lets me pick up the differences quickly, when all the logic basically stays the same.

  - Ray-tracing (for example) is easy to reason about in an object oriented fashion (this was before functional was all the rage)
  - You're never done. There are always new lighting models, surface models (shaders), geometries, optimizers to add
  - Each module, pretty quickly, gives you visible results.
  - Because it's modular, there's lots of opportunity for incremental refactoring of modules and for re-implementation of modules in new languages
  - It could be part of a (much) larger ecosystem. Maybe you want to add water - oceans are fun. To add robot simulators, you need a physics engine. To which you can add ML to generate and optimize controllers to have the robot hit goals. etc. etc.

I'm not suggesting a rendering test-bed specifically, but unbounded problems that can be modularized where you always have a list of "next modules" is one way to have an ever-green project you are always adding things too -- sometimes (but not necessarily) in new languages, using new development paradigms. For me, agent-based computational economics, various physics-related simulations (in general), machine-learning around robotics (control systems) and that rendering test-bed were my "domains" of experimentation. For you, it could well be just about anything else.

Anyway, most code is just hacked together because writing working code is hard.

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Think of learning as an interactive loop: you try something and see the outcome. Like, if you're learning to throw a baseball, you try a million of small adjustments until your body-mind gets a feel of the movement and the associated outcome (read The Inner Game Of Tennis).

Similarly, when programming, your mind starts thinking and imagining in the constructs it experienced and internalized. Getting a feel of these constructs and patterns is the result of using them enough times to build things or solve puzzles.

If you want to get a feel of ruby, I recommend going through the exercises here:

https://github.com/JoshCheek/ruby-kickstart

The videos are optional, just download the repo, set up ruby and rspec, open your favorite text editor and you're set.

- Some languages and frameworks have a "best practices" guide.

- RTFM!

- Iterate. Your first attempt will always feel hacky. Revisit it after more studying and practice.

Here's how I would do it:

1. Skim an introductory book. This will give you an overview of language features, syntax and libraries. And when you get stuck on something confusing you'll have some vague memory of "oh, chapter 7 covered that feature, let me look it up."

2. Read some well-commented, good code in the language in a problem domain your understand. E.g. if you're backend web developer find a web framework which is similar to one you've used in a language you know.

3. Modify some existing code in the language. This means you'll be able to tell if the code runs, you'll have examples to work off of, a testing setup you can hook in to, and so on.

4. Write some new code in a highly structured way where there are pre-existing examples for the task you're doing. E.g. use a high-level framework, or write a middleware plugin.

5. After all that you might be ready to make something completely from scratch.

I learnt a lot of python because I disconnected the wifi and used offline documentation.

Online documentation / sites like stackoverflow are great when you need information with very narrow scope. Great for getting the job done; but not for learning / understanding / memory retention.

When you need to learn something you have to see the whole picture. For that there is nothing better than books or offline documentation.

If you're just getting started it helps a lot to have a handle on html/css, javascript, jQuery and ruby/PHP before diving in to a framework for web app related stuff.

So if you need to take some time and learn HTML/CSS and some javascript/jQuery.

I would learn languages in this order HTML/CSS, javascript, jQuery, PHP/MySQL, then Rails or Laravel, then Vue,React, etc. if you're interested in web apps.

My first go at learning Rails was too early and I had a difficult time and gave up.

After creating a web app from scratch, writing a basic login, CRUD and learning the inner workings of a basic web application I gave rails another go and it clicked and went smoothly.

The first time I didn't understand the basics of a web application and had a difficult time knowing what rails was doing or what to do next.

So I think it depends on what level you are at.

As far as cutting and pasting, when you're learning cutting and pasting is fine, even as an advanced programmer you're always going to be learning and looking at what others have done as a starting point.

When you cut and paste you'll usually be modifying it to make it do what you want. So take a little extra time and research what it's doing till you understand it so you can use it again and understand what it does/can/can not do.

Choose something you'll use not a straight copy paste tutorial. Choose something with the basics of a web application, you can follow tutorials for that but add in something unique that you'll have to create from scratch. This is where the learning takes place.

So maybe an app you can login to and track your lego star wars collection, or an app you and your friends can log in to and have your own private twitter or social network. Maybe something that connects to an api of a service you use. Sign up for Stripe and create something with a billing/subscription component.

Just build one part of it at a time. Set a goal, this evening or this weekend I'm going to build this part and have it up and running.

Good luck, enjoy learning something new, Happy Holidays.

Would you learn math by copying and pasting from a solutions manual? Would you learn to write fiction by copy pasting others' short stories?

You won't learn to write code without writing code.

was much easier to just find existing codebases and tinker with some functionality of them to learn, while asking those more experienced to clarify anything i couldn't figure out with a bit of trial and error/looking up usage of similar code elsewhere within the codebase

personally, i learned c++/lua (though im not by any means 'advanced' in them) from an mmo server emulator since it was easy to see how gameplay was affected and compare expected vs intended results

also im barely awake rn so this comment probably makes zero sense