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

3 points by strombofulous ↗ HN
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.

3 comments

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yjftsjthsd-h
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.
lambda_obrien
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.
username90
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.