Someone recently asked me for tips because they wanted to learn python. I figured my response could probably use a public document, so here it is.
Also, I recently learnt zig, so I will be using that as a bit of a reference.
There are many good resources for learning programming languages. Many people believe in courses. I personally beg to differ. I think courses are useful and can teach basic syntax, but ultimately they don’t teach the full language. If you want to do a course, that’s fine. In fact, I’ve done a few courses myself and will freely admit they taught me a fair bit. The biggest problem with courses is that people take them, add “java expertise” to their resume and never touch the language again.
What you should do instead is make stuff. Different languages are good for different aspects. Here are some popular applications of different languages:
I actually have no idea what people write in haskell, but I once used an AUR helper written in it, so that kind of thing I guess.
Be warned that forth is a very different language to the others mentioned here.
There are a few different ways of learning the basics of a new language. Ultimately you need to write code and make stuff to get better, but to learn the basics there are a few different methods.
Courses can teach you basic syntax and get you comfortable working with a language. They don’t make you an expert by any means, or even necessarily proficient, as that comes with time, but they can teach you some basics.
Books are often really good intermediate learning material, where you can look up any topic and learn about it, provided you already know some of the basics. An example of what books can be good at teaching is topics like pointers in C.
Google is a very useful tool for specific problems. Let’s say you want to parse XML in python. You can type it into google and find more resources to go off of. In this specific example, you might find the python documentation on the built in XML parsing library.
This also kind of includes LLMs like chatGPT I guess. One thing to be aware of is that LLMs don’t recommend resources like google does. They are also sometimes effectively useless or even outright wrong. This isn’t saying google doesn’t have these properties sometimes, however with google you can always scroll down to the next link.
You can also learn by watching other people. This often takes the form of livestreams and livestream recordings, which can commonly be found on platforms such as youtube and twitch. They can teach you some best practices and build good habits.
Watching other people is particularly helpful if you are unable to learn in another way, such as writing code yourself or taking a course.
If you know roughly what the syntax of a language should look like, which might come from taking a course or just reading through an example program, one of my favourite ways to learn a language is to just try stuff.
This is especially helpful for languages like rust, where the compiler is very stringent.
Ultimately, the best and only way get better at making things in a new programming language is to make things in said new programming language. There aren’t any shortcuts you can or should take, just write things.
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