Ask HN: Has anyone learned programming entirely from watching videos? - Onixelen
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rffn
You learn by using it. Videos, books, etc. are good as a starter but to
actually learn it you need to experiment, do exercises and preferably use what
you exercised in a real project, something you care about.

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gridspy
So, do you mean that at no point you actually write code?

Best site for beginning coders : starts with a video then has a "video" of
coding that you can pause and interact with. Very friendly and simple to start
with.

It is a good language to start with too.

[https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-
programming/p...](https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-
programming/programming)

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Onixelen
I was implying that you write code and you practice/try things out as you're
watching. Sorry should have explicitly mentioned that.

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wayn3
You learn by doing. If thats implied, then the medium through which baseline
knowledge is delivered doesn't matter much. Pick the one that you get along
with. If that's videos over books, so be it.

Ideally, you would watch videos from an intro course at stanford or MIT. Those
are known for uploading such lecture series.

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pyrophane
You can learn a lot from videos, but you'll need to apply it buy doing actual
coding in the form of exercises and projects.

Also, depending on what kind of programming you want to do, you'll likely be
working with a lot of tools for which no good video learning resources exit,
which is why is is very important to be able to read and understand developer
documentation and source code.

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snicky
It depends what do you mean by that. I don't think you can actually learn
something just by watching other people doing it, but online courses are a
good start. I started to learn programming from an online Ruby on Rails
course, then I created my first website (something like 9gag) and landed my
first job after a couple of months. It happend to be a small company that has
later created a mobile app that we managed to scale from 0 to over 100M users.
I was even a main backend guy in there for some time. So yeah, watching videos
might definitely be a good start, but I'd say the actual "learning" is a long
process and requires lots of attention.

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newbear
How did you land this job?

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snicky
Found them online and applied via e-mail :)

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yodsanklai
Some people even learned using books :)

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Severianx
I have. I built a career from watching Jeffrey Way talk about php and
javascript years ago. He has a video site called Laracasts now. Videos are a
good way to start, but you have to love it to be good at it. Don't listen to
language purists. Start with what you like.

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Onixelen
> I have. I built a career from watching Jeffrey Way talk about php and
> javascript years ago.

This is what I need to hear.

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pythonbull
Practice makes perfect and helps you in memorization as well.

