

What new language/tool to teach myself in 1 week with no Internet connection? - jwoww

I&#x27;m going off on a 7-day Caribbean cruise with the family, and Wifi will cost an arm and a leg.<p>I&#x27;ve been hacking on an iOS (native ObjC) app with a Rails backend in my spare time for a while. Even with quite a bit of experience, I find that it&#x27;s easy to get roadblocked working on these things without the Internet due to:<p><pre><code>  * need to search StackOverflow for how to do something in Cocoa&#x2F;ObjC
  * need to download a new gem&#x2F;pod
  * my app uses some APIs to get data
</code></pre>
With that in mind, I&#x27;m looking for a new project&#x2F;language that has a mature set of offline resources such that I can download everything I need and be self contained on my machine for a week.<p>To me, that means the following requirements, but I haven&#x27;t thought super hard about them:<p><pre><code>  * Complete, readable documentation downloadable and accessible offline
  * Well-written downloadable tutorial&#x2F;ebook with solutions&#x2F;sample code
  * No dependencies on downloaded modules, etc.
  * Can make meaningful progress with 10-14 hours across 7 days
</code></pre>
Some of my interests:<p><pre><code>  * Android development (I know C but not Java) or a cross-platform mobile framework
  * data visualization (d3js)
  * R (have dabbled for about a dozen hours)
  * coding competitions
  * Kaggle (only lurked so far)
  * Javascript (I use jquery; just hack things together right now)
</code></pre>
I recently learned sed and awk from simple tutorials, and I think those kinds of things are definitely in scope. Not sure what other Unix tools I&#x27;ve been missing out on, though.<p>Without a lot of justification, I&#x27;m not so interested in things like node.js, Go, Scala, etc. because I can&#x27;t think of much use for them. I&#x27;m an Analytics guy professionally, not an engineer.<p>Would appreciate any ideas!
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EricaJoy
Since you're doing iOS development, I am going to assume you're using a Mac.
If this assumption is correct, whatever you choose to learn, I strongly
suggest you install Dash ([http://kapeli.com/dash](http://kapeli.com/dash))
and grab all documentation related to your language of choice. HTH!

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jwoww
Thanks! Never knew about this. This is GREAT.

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thomasmeagher
Definitely go with Python if you know some R. Check out Learn Python the Hard
Way
([http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/](http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/)).
Either save the pages or just buy the book. It will be challenging, but you'll
learn a lot and shouldn't need Internet, since everything is in the book.

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joeclark77
Python is always a joy to program, and has plenty of documentation available.
It is IMHO eclipsing R as a data analysis + visualization language and you can
use it for all kinds of other stuff too.

If you don't know databases yet, I would think that PostgreSQL or MongoDB
would make a good project for a few days. There's this book called "Seven
Databases in Seven Weeks" which is outstanding, but I'm not sure you can use
it offline because the book itself doesn't explain how to install or
troubleshoot the databases. (There are other books in this series: "Seven
Programming Languages", "Seven Web Frameworks", etc...)

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szimano
Learn having a life

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wwwhatcrack
Learn Mexican

