Ask HN: How many "self-taught" programmers and how did you do it?

1) Self taught from books, some urging from my mother but not a lot of real help. Occasionally she'd show me tricks. I remember seeing my first loop from her when I was trying to make a line of text scroll across a screen.

2) Five or six. My mother owned a ZX spectrum - this would be around '93 '94 - and she had a bunch of old magazines that had programs in them, so I started typing them in. I'd also done some programming on a BBC before this - but that was with my mother's urging so not really a self-taught thing.

3) I was 16 when I sold my first program to a shop I did some volunteer work at. It was a simple thing that just did ranked correlation coefficients to arbitrary sets of data so that they could keep track of what their KPIs were telling them.

More substantially, I did it after uni. Graduated with a philosophy degree, which was the subject I found least objectionable, and found myself largely unemployable in any other line of work.

I believe any programming is self-taught. I know that I had some course in a community center when I was very young, probably like 10 or so, and while these courses probably got me interested and taught me the basics, I think most of my skills came from solitary practice and studying books.

Moocs can be a better introduction to programming than mere books, but I haven't seen any evidence on how successful MOOCs are at teaching programming.

1) Self taught from breaking stuff and trying to fix it. Started out creating games in BASIC, then hacked around with PHP and got into writing bespoke plugins for a phpBB community. I also wrote a few patches for OpenTTD and learnt some C doing that. Next I got "The RSpec Book" and learnt about testing and Rails. I then went and did a CS degree, however I feel it didn't really give me anything I didn't already know - I have never needed to know what a red-black tree or hill climbing is in my professional life, although I'm sure if I didn't do it I would regret it [0]. After that got a proper job doing Rails and learnt a lot more from working with others.

2) 2002

3) 2009, although if I didn't do three years of university it would have been sooner.

EDIT:

[0] I think university is also good for life experience, and I still think it holds true that most companies (even non super-mega-corp) prefer people to have degrees.

I am "self-taught". Started in 1981 when I was 10 years old and my mother bought me a sinclair zx81 instead of the Atari 2600 I wanted for Christmas. It came with a bunch of games in the form of 3 books. After my initial shock and disappointment wore off I started to input the games and became hooked on programming.

I did study a uni CS and EE for a couple of years, but left because my school was way behind what was happening in the real world at the time. I was consulting in the IT world, and thought at the time that the CS stuff was hopelessly outdated. I realised years later that I should have stuck with it because now I know that some of the theory is universal and timeless and would have stopped me from reinventing wheels a lot.

I've mainly learned by doing, solving problems using technology. I learned in the beginning from books and usenet, then gopher was my friend and eventually of course the web. I still find a good book is the main foundation I use for learning, supported by things such as forums and MOOCs (I've yet to find a MOOC I agree with, mainly because I am personally not a big fan of video learning - I still like books the most)

I've worked on and off in the IT world for 25+ years, currently I am an English teacher, I do IT projects on the side and I'm about to tackle e-learning head on with a new start-up. I would have trouble finding a job because I have no formal degree (people toss my CV/resume) and I am late to the world of github so nowhere to point people to see my work as most of the problems I have solved are internal problems businesses have. So most of my work comes through word of mouth recommendations, and I only take projects nowadays that have an new, interesting angle for me - point in case I am learning NoSQL and Graphing DBs to create a recommendation system for a network of insurance brokers. (I think the problem could actually be solved trivially with Postgres and judicial use of statistical analysis, so I am creating 2 solutions in parallel to see which one will perform better at scale as well as more accurate). I've never done rec systems before, but I'm a big fan of AI and ML, so this seems like an interesting problem to research and look into, as well as having the opportunity to be a little profitable.

* I learned from books and some online tutorials. I would use coursera and similar tools, but the were not available in 2000. I made some friends online trough irc & xmpp but beside that i had no contact to fellow programmers during the first 4 years. * I started to work as a programmer around 7 years later. First i finished school than i worked in an unrelated field for 2 years (great experience).

I am a CS Student, but I have been programming years before I got into college.

1. Self taught from internet resources and experiments. I still remember stuffing my 128MB flash drive with HTML pages so that I can read them at home. Originally got into programming to cheat in some games. Started with making trainers/ memory editing and bot for MMOs.

2. 3rd year of middle school. Around 2005, I think. Accessed the internet for the first time.

3. Not yet. but I have been trying to learn more about the topic ever since I realize whats possible with it, and my decision to learn more seriously about programming led me to taking CS degree in college.

I started by writing BASIC code on my TI calculator in high school. First I just dumbly recopied some sample code in the manual, then I started tinkering with it and adding functionality. I was so bored in high school that I spent most of my time on my calculator writing code.

When the BASIC started to feel too slow and limited I switched to C. I never really learned the language "formally", my original code was filled with GOTOs and local variables (I was coming from BASIC after all). Then with practice it gradually improved. I still fondly remember the "wow" moment when I understood the point of function-local (stack allocated, but back then I didn't know what the stack was...) vars.

Now I write low level C code for embedded systems for a living.

I learned almost entirely from books. Reading computer books now is an addiction :-) the only real thing I learned from technical college was the very basics of relational databases... And even then when I revisited the concepts I'd been taught a lot of misconceptions.

I learned to program in C in the late 80s, before the web, and then went on to do a CS degree at university.

Learning to code was very difficult in those days.

1. There were no free compilers outside of academia.

2. Compilers cost hundreds of dollars

3. Programming books cost $50 each

I used to buy $5 shareware disks that claimed to have compilers and tutorials on them and they never had exactly what was advertised.

In the end I managed to buy a second-hand slightly out-of-date compiler (Turbo-C?). I still seemed to spend any spare cash I had on books.

I just got obsessed with it while still in grade school and spent all of my spare time learning and trying stuff. I started hundreds of little useless projects, all of them out of my league.

Pre-planned courses never appealed to me at all, maybe because of some slight ADD tendencies. They try to titrate knowledge in a steady, regulated, and pedagogic way. That just bores the shit out me. The only thing that even remotely excites me is diving into doing things that are too difficult for me, failing, beating my head against my desk, asking real people for help (not supervisors or TA's), making tiny exhilarating steps of progress.

I'm generally very skeptical about all kinds of teaching, upbringing, and so on. Like when parents and educators try to ensure that their kids turn out good by adhering to various "time-honored" methods and curricula, and fail to realize that they're just locking their kids up for decades, ineffectively preaching at them while they wait for the break so they can talk about whatever they're actually, genuinely, vitally interested in.

Maybe I'm just weird, but to me joining a MOOC seems like tying oneself up in chains to learn how to walk. There does seem to be people who actually find sustainable motivation in that sort of thing, but the statistics seem to say they're not as many as those who only think they will.

By all means dabble around with some courses to get your feet wet, but don't expect to become a good programmer by following other peoples' curricula!

1) Self thought from copy pasting code and changing out parts until it works, moved on to books later. What was always most important for me was to have a goal in mind, something that you build towards or really want to accomplish, with brute force and excessive Googling if necessary.

2. Read my first programming book when I was 15, on ASP of all things but I had been learning HTML on my own prior to that, following tutorials online. My school also offered a short course on Turbo Pascal.

3. Got my first job as a Flash programmer when I was 18 and I'm soon turning 27, employed as a Full Stack Developer (don't hate) without having a CS degree. I do have a bachelors degree in Media but it's essentially worthless and has nothing to do with my work.

I'm self-taught and a relatively late starter. I've also never studied computer science in a formal setting (i.e. at a university).

I started programming when I was studying for a PhD (in mathematics) around 2006-07. I was 23 at the time. That was mainly in Matlab and Fortran. My code from those 3-4 years is, frankly, pretty horrifying.

When I got my first job in industry (quant at an investment bank in 2010) I had to learn Java, and a language called Q[0], which is a very fast array-processing language with a functional feel and a built-in query language for the KDB database. I also picked up a little bit of R, mainly because I was building a lot of statistical models and it was far easier than doing it in Java.

That piqued my interest in functional programming, and I subsequently learnt Haskell using the book Learn You A Haskell[1]. I picked up Python around the same time when I was trying to write a web scraper, and finding it painful in any of the languages that I currently knew. For that I used Learn Python The Hard Way[2].

When I started a new job in 2011 I started writing Matlab again, causing me to finally learn it properly. Around that time I decided to try and learn a low-level language, so I picked C, mainly because there was an interesting edX course [3] that I wanted to try (the Harvard course CS50).

I'm at a weird in-between stage now. I can write comfortably in half a dozen languages, but there's a whole swathe of programming that is completely alien to me (web design, networking, and any kind of formal software architecture). I've written a lot of heavily numerical and mathematical code, but never written a CRUD app or a web page. I still don't know Javascript.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(programming_language_from_Kx...

[1] http://learnyouahaskell.com/

[2] http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

[3] https://www.edx.org/

Forty-something programmer (diversified into various forms of consulting). Self-taught from printed matter before the Internet existed. Started coding on a ZX81, moved up to Apple ][, then to Macs. Dropped out of college to start working as a coder at 20. I started out as a freelance games programmer but that was a bit beyond my business (not coding) skills of the time, I took a job at a startup(ish) instead.

Nearly all of my learning happened on the job, as a result of taking on projects involving technologies that I had no clue about when I started and mostly mastered by the time I finished. Pretty much what is now called a "full stack" developer as a result.

I'm a self-taught programmer, my background is actually in Financial Economics.

I believe the best way to teach yourself is to solve your own problem or build something you're truly passionate about. You can either do something new or improve something you currently use. This is how I taught myself to code in PHP, although now I can also write applications in Python.

Almost all of my knowledge is fully self taught with internet (no books) except for proper OOP like in cpp. That I did when they taught me in college. But I learned html5/css3/js/php/mysql/unix command line etc on my own. I was "introduced" in 10th grade in high school when school wanted to make a website. I took up the offer and they were glad their student was making it. It looked hideous (at least the first iteration did) used tables and in-line js but this was like 2008 and I had no previous knowledge. I never really looked back since then. I keep doing something. There was always something I was looking forward to learn/do. I wanted to solve my own problems and find solutions or make things easier for myself. Now I make things easier for others and it feels great. I spent most of my time on Google/SO. I had to work very hard. I remember it very well, it was never easy (it still is not) but work is now a lot less frustrating. The most important thing I learnt myself was probably ow to solve problems. With google primarily, but ability to find solutions to your coding problems via google is very important. And I learnt it the hard way. And college is fun because I have basic html in my next year of college but I know that stuff for at least 4 years. So it should be fun.

1. I learned in the 4th grade. I built my elementary school's static website and was allowed to use the computer lab instead of attending class, as my parents had already taught me the majority of stuff through ~6th/7th grade level. It was a "gifted" classroom, and most of the students were there with me. After I built the website, I had my parents buy me a book on C, which happened to be K&R. I can't say I understood exactly what I was doing at that age (I doubt anyone ages 8-11 really has that mental connection), but I knew how to make command line programs.

2. See 1, more or less. I'd say I -really- started to learn when I built my own website in high school that started bringing in money and still does today. It was a full web application to start and I just kept rebuilding it from scratch as I learned new stuff (object-oriented programming, design patterns, etc).

3. I wouldn't really call myself a professional. I went into bioengineering and medicine, but I still program every day because it runs our current world and will for the foreseeable future. I market myself as a software engineer, but I only accept jobs I find interesting or that pay 6-7 figure salaries.

My parents bought me one of these when I was in basic school: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum

I was happy playing games for a few weeks and then it broke. It took one month to fix, so meanwhile I was left with the BASIC manual it came with. I read it to withstand the cravings and when I got the computer back I was already more interested in coding than playing games.

I am above average developer who learnt by myself, to answer your questions -

1) How did you learn to code? Totally self taught from books and RTFM // Self taught plus MOOCs or comparable resources // Some classes in college but no CS degree, remainder self-taught // Self taught plus a developer bootcamp or some non-degree related formal education // CS degree and personal efforts

Unfortunately I never worked in any company so had to learn all the coding by myself and I strongly feels, if you want to be a good developer, you should work in a company and on real world applications with people who knows more than you which speeds up the learning. Though I am working full time on my own marketing product, if given a change, I would love to work part time in any company for free. There are few things which you can never learn from books and tutorial videos

2) When did you start learning (perhaps informative because of the recent rise of MOOCs)?

I do have a computer science degree from a reputed engineering college but I learnt nothing there, though I do have exposure towards programming for 10 years, I only started building real world apps in last 12 months.

3) At what point (if yet) did you start working as a programmer professionally relative to your initial efforts?

last 12 months, I am learning and writing code in parallel.

Self-taught.

1) books, and working on personal projects to "scratch an itch"; progets grew larger, at some time I started doing it professionally

2) ages ago :)

3) I started as a sysadmin since that's what I self-learned from, programming came later maybe 3-4 years

Reading other replies, I totally forgot to mention I first started programming in Basic on a TI-99 with a tape recorder for storage. :D

I had no computer until I was 18 (couldn't buy one :/), so in order to compensate, I stayed in the school's computer lab whenever I was allowed, where I played mostly with TurboPascal and BASIC. Just after the high school, I started volunteering in the local IT company, doing some VB stuff. After 3rd month they have employed me on a full-time basis. 11 years FF, I am in Germany where almost everybody working in the IT has a degree, developing PKI-related products in .NET, and before that I rejected a CTO offer.

I still learn and read a lot, I have always one course going (most recently on Coursera).

I learned by having problems I needed to solve, and I knew that a computer could solve those problems.

For me the most important thing is not having a rule book. If you believe deeply that you need a CS degree or to follow a popular route into the industry then I believe that you will fail to learn as everything will seem to be an obstacle that you are not privileged enough to overcome.

Without a rule book, and with the belief that anything is possible... and if you can break down your problems into logical things you can describe... then you can teach yourself how to solve the problem.

My first step was a simple one, I had a manual mailing list which was names and addresses on bits of paper that I photocopied onto Avery label sheets. This was in 1993 and when the mailing list exceeded 2,000 I knew a computer could do this easier then I could. I purchased an IBM 386 and had no internet access (or knowledge that it existed) and could only learn from books as I also knew no programmers.

I purchased a book called Programming Perl, and just set to it. I think it took about 2 weeks to get the full mailing list application built, with flat-file datastore, printing, etc all complete and working. Looking back, everything was horrible about the implementation, it was ugly, inefficient, virtually unmaintainable... but it worked.

By 1996 I had started selling merchandise to the mailing list and written stock management, VAT accounting and reconciliation, the paper mailing list, an email marketing list, a shopping cart web-site, a community area on the web-site. This was effectively a shift from hobby programmer into a professional programmer and the start of a career in computing.

If I had been told those things were hard, or belonging to the problem domain of highly educated programmers, then perhaps I wouldn't have tried.

Believing in advance that anything was possible gave me the motivation to persevere, an obstacle would clearly be overcome if I could just stand back and think clearly about it.

After that... just carry on solving problems. Every time you have a new problem you gain fresh experience. Over time, that adds up.

I'm self-taught - when I was in my early teens at high-school, my parents wouldn't let me watch TV or play computer games until the evening. Fiddling with HTML looked enough like school work that I got away with it during the afternoons after school.

I built a bunch of personal websites, and sold my first professional website (static HTML) to a local estate agent when I was 15, back in 2000. I charged £300 - around $500 at the time. I worked for them for a couple of years, updating properties etc.

I studied Law at university, but worked on websites for my college, the student paper and various sports teams. I started my first startup when I was 19 - I wrote a lot of bad PHP and inline MySQL queries whenever I needed data in what we now call "views". There was no test suite, no version control and I often made changes straight into production, because I couldn't get a LAMP environment running consistently on my PC. This repeatedly took the site down for hours at a time. This was back in 2004. The bad old days.

I took a break from coding to join a management consultancy for almost 3 years, although I ended up automating a lot of my work in Visual Basic (through Excel), and went on to teach the Excel course to colleagues.

I started my second company at the start of 2011, during an enforced 3-month period of "gardening leave" between two jobs. I decided that I wanted to learn how to code properly, so I bought "Agile Web Development with Rails", published by Pragmatic Programmers, and worked through it in about 3 or 4 days, non-stop. This was an epiphany - web development all started to make sense, and we launched the first version of our site about 2 weeks later. I knew enough Ruby to be dangerous, but probably not enough to get a job as a professional programmer.

As my co-founder was teaching himself HTML & CSS at the time, we didn't really have expertise in-house, so I spent a lot of time on the #rubyonrails channel on freenode - a wonderful place to get help on anything Rails related. Stack Overflow was also very useful.

By March or April of 2011, we'd been accepted onto Y Combinator and hired our first (extremely capable) engineer, who had a CS degree. This spurred me on to become more technically capable, so I just started devouring programming books. I've mostly steered away from the classics (Gang of Four just didn't make sense from a Ruby point-of-view), but there are often more practical, up-to-date equivalents in the language of your choice. "Design Patterns in Ruby" and "Eloquent Ruby", both by Russ Olsen, stand out for me.

Ruby Koans, and then implementing a bunch of common sorting algorithms have kept me keen to keep learning the more theoretical side of stuff. I've had a little more time on my hands recently, so I've divided into open-source software - I'm currently trying to help out with Resque 2.0 (pull request coming soon, I promise!).

I've recently played around with Clojure and Go, but I'm struggling to get into them without a practical project to spur me on.

I'd say I'm now competent enough to have a good shot at getting most Ruby-based development jobs out there, if that was a path I wanted to take. And it only took 14 years!

1) self tought qbasic,c++ and php.Via book learn qbasic and tutorial in msdos 5.0 2)After had trouble not enough income work in mechanical engineering company(Car industry).target want to make spc.. 3)After taking certificate in 2007 4)Still learning other language like java,.net mvc razor but still fallback to php for real life working.

1. By reading the source code of tape programs and magazine source listings. The BBC Micro boots to a command prompt and has Basic in ROM, so that was fairly helpful... and from then on for other languages, self-taught by viewing source code. 2. As soon as i could! (aged about 7) 3. My second job, after 3 months of hell in telesales.

1) How did you learn to code?

It started with a book named "Basic para niños" (BASIC for Kids,) which as you may guess, taught me some BASIC when I was 8 years old. Then a few years later I learnt some basic Pascal (I don't remember where from, it may have been a class in my school, when I was around 11 or 12.) Then I taught me some assembler from a book (around 15) and Visual Basic (and Visual Basic for Applications) around that time, too. I didn't learn anything new until 17 when I started with Lisp and a little later, Python. Then in my university I was taught C (which I complemented by reading TFM, i.e. the K&R book.) After that I've learnt on my own many more languages, up to a certain fluency. The list of things I can at least write a "hello world" (actually if I have learnt it I can write something larger once I get back into the language structure, because every language I learn is for "something") includes Basic, Pascal (well, actually I don't remember much about Pascal,) C, Lisp (that's Common Lisp mainly, and quite a lot of Emacs Lisp... I can write Scheme, but somehow I never got really into the deeper parts of it that make it "Scheme",) Prolog, Forth, Go, Javascript (that's for the browser and for node.js,) Awk, Bash (heh,) Java (ugh,), octave/Matlab, R, PHP and probably 1 or 2 more I'm forgetting right now. I'm currently writing quite a lot of Go, trying to find some use for J to learn it (it's fg crazy!)

2) When did you start learning (perhaps informative because of the recent rise of MOOCs)?

When I was 7-8, that's (whoah) 23 years ago, in 1990-91, before I even had a computer at home.

3) At what point (if yet) did you start working as a programmer professionally relative to your initial efforts?

I'm not sure when the correct timing is. When I was working as a researcher I wrote quite a lot of code as part of my work, and now even if I write a lot of code for work, my main work is not being a programmer. It took a long time, of course, because I started early and didn't start to do real work until right after college.