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What's the best way to learn programming if you have degree in Computer Science?

1 points by shivajikobardan ↗ HN
Take students like this:

https://cseducators.stackexchange.com/questions/7094/i-am-a-cs-student-but-i-dont-know-how-to-code-projects-how-do-i-learn-this

and this:

https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/185340/what-can-be-careers-in-it-for-computer-engineering-students-who-cant-do-program

They want to learn MERN stack web development. How should they approach it? Thing is they're good at understanding theoritical concepts but not so good at programming already.

5 comments

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justtoni
Practice. Just do it. Start doing it. Something. Anything. Start with any project that is meaningful to you. It doesn't need to be large or have business value.

You can start with a tutorial that covers building up a small project just to get that first introduction with the technology stack, but don't get into the tutorial loophole because it is usually one way (step by step) learning.

shivajikobardan
What do you practice when you're a beginner and really don't know what's happening at all? I need a general flow of something before I start making a project. Documentation are very hard to follow. What do you recommend text based tutorials/books or video courses. Do you've any in mind for MERN? Please share!
justtoni
Everyone was/is a beginner at some point. Even if you think about other areas in life, you need to begin in order to improve, e.g. driving a car, riding a bicycle, using any tool, learning to cook, etc. That's why I recommended to do a tutorial first. A tutorial that is building a small project in a tech stack you are looking for.

For the text based, blogs, books or video courses, it is all up to you. Some people will do better with blogs, some with video courses - there is no general rule. I like text based tutorials because I usually want to try something on my own before continuing with the tutorial. That's why video courses don't work for me because my pace needs to be aligned with the pace from the video which is almost never the case.

inphovore
It’s frustrating to try to be helpful for someone with a degree that says “Documentation are hard to follow”. Maybe you chose the wrong field?

Start with a single isolated component, say a simple static react single page web page.

Make your own website that shares some very basic interests you have.

Get that up on a service (maybe an AWS free tier or something.)

Then do something a little more complex, like create a fake/demo store front that sells pictures of goats or something.

Keep doing new isolated projects for yourself one piece at a time until you have at least enough experience to be helpful to someone else (like a relative who wants help putting together their own website, or a Craigslist gig project, etc.)

The secret to being a successful developer isn’t writing everything from scratch. It is finding an open source project that mostly does what you need and adapting it for your purposes.

And btw, I would avoid mongoDB unless that is something you know you will need. MySQL is more common and versatile, though everyone will say that about their go-to datastore.

shivajikobardan
I don't see why it's wrong to accept documentation are tough to read for beginners. Maybe degrees from USA are so good you can read docs easily after getting them. They're not that good out here. I used to read books instead of RFCs to learn. But later I'd use RFCs to solve my confusions while learning networking concepts. That's the way. I'm stuck at the first phase. I'm just copying pasting code(typing), not learning anything. I fix an error I learn sth but getting the big picture is tough. A resourceful resource that covers theory behind what's happening could be of great help in this case but I'm not finding one. Books get outdated fast.