i am a self taught programmer. i don’t know that i’d recommend it to anyone else there are so many different curricula and training programs that are well tested and very efficacious. for lots of historical reasons, many programmers end up being all or mostly self taught: in the early days because programming was vocational and people learned on the job, then because people learned programming on their own before entering cs programs, and more recently because the demand for programmers (and rate of change) for the kinds of programming work that are in the most demand these days. and knowing that it’s possible (and potentially cheaper) to teach yourself, it seems like a tempting option.

this post, then, is a collection of suggestions, guidelines, and pointers for anyone attempting to teach themselves to program:

• focus on learning one thing (programming language and problem domain) at a time. there are so many different things you could learn, and people who know how to program seem to have an endless knowledge of different things. knowing one set of tools and one area (e.g. “web development in javascript,” or “system administration in python,") gives you the framework to expand later, and the truth is that you’ll be able to learn additional things more easily once you have a framework to build upon.

• when learning something in programming, always start with a goal. have some piece of data that you want to explore or visualize, have a set of files that you want to organize, or something that you want to accomplish. learning how to program without a goal, means that you don’t end up asking the kinds of questions that you need to form the right kinds of associations.

• programming is all about learning different things: if you end up programming for long enough you’ll end up learning different languages, and being able to pick up new things is the real skill.

• being able to clearly capture what you were thinking when you write code is basically a programming super power.

• programming is about understanding problems¹ abstractly and building abstractions around various kinds of problems. being able break apart these problems into smaller core issues, and thinking abstractly about the problem so that you can solve both the problem in front of you and also solve it in the future are crucial skills.

• collect questions or curiosities as you encounter them, but don’t feel like you have to understand everything, and use this to guide your background reading, but don’t feel like you have to hunt down the answer to every term you hear or see that you don’t already know immediately. if you’re pretty rigorous about going back and looking things up, you’ll get a pretty good base knowledge over time.

• always think about the users of your software as you build, at every level. even if you’re building software for your own use, think about the future version of yourself that will use that software, imagine that other people might use the interfaces and functions that you write and think about what assumptions they might bring to the table. think about the output that your program, script, or function produces, and how someone would interact with that output.

• think about the function as the fundamental building block of your software. lower level forms (i.e. statements) are required, but functions are the unit where meaning is created in the context of a program. functions, or methods depending, take input (arguments, ususally, but sometimes also an object in the case of methods) and produce some output, sometimes with some kind of side-effect. the best functions:

  • clearly indicate side-effects when possible.
  • have a mechanism for reporting on error conditions (exceptions, return values,)
  • avoid dependencies on external state, beyond what is passed as arguments.
  • are as short as possible.
  • use names that clearly describe the behavior and operations of the function.

  if programming were human language (english,) you’d strive to construct functions that were simple sentences and not paragraph’s, but also more than a couple of words/phrases, and you would want these sentences to be clear to understand with limited context. if you have good functions, interfaces are more clear and easier to use, code becomes easier to read and debug, and easier to test.

• avoid being too weird. many programmers are total nerds, and you may be too, and that’s ok, but it’s easier to learn how to do something if there’s prior art that you can learn from and copy. on a day-to-day basis, a lot of programming work is just doing something until you get stuck and then you google for the answer. If you’re doing something weird--using a programming language that’s less widely used, or in a problem space that is a bit out of mainstream, it can be harder to find answers to your problems.

Notes