

Ask HN: On learning to code: Are you left or right brained? - apsurd

Interactive <i>jump into code immediately</i> tutorials seem to be all the rage now. I'm talking about approaches like codecademy.com and learn.knockoutjs.com<p>This strikes me as very left-brain centric learning - very pragmatic.<p>However being left-handed I learn best via high-level conceptual introductions to concepts. <i>This is how and why backbone.js works the way it does...</i> . From there going through all the examples is a beautiful journey filled with "ahah" moments.<p>I plan to dedicate a lot of my time to writing conceptual tutorials of how things work.<p>Thoughts?
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mrweasel
I love that idea. I was looking as the "documentation" for a web-framework
yesterday. All I was getting was tutorials and videos, nothing that explained
to me how the damn thing works. Most of my questions would have been answer
more quickly with a simple "Here's how it works and here's the API".

A few times a week I browse the mailinglist archives for the OpenBSD cvs and
misc lists. Why some people may see it as rude, I find it refreshing when the
developers tell people that reading walkthrough, tutorials, quick start guides
and googling isn't a substitute for learning how things work. Sadly few
products/projects make it easy to learn how things work and focus solely on
"here's how you do X/Y/Z. Just tell me how it works and I'll figure it out.

I honestly think that this "left-brain centric" approach is to blame for a lot
of people picking wrong solution for the problems. Of cause people should know
better and get a more in depth knowledge before picking a tools, but
realistically that doesn't happen as often as we would like.

I think there would be a large audience for the type of documentation that
your suggest and I believe that it would a lot of people, my self included, to
be better developers.

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tygorius
I don't know that it's a right-brain vs left-brain thing so much as a
preference in learning style: do you prefer to get the big picture first and
then make it real with small chunks, or do you prefer the small chunks first
and building the big picture afterward? Although I prefer the big picture
first, I've learned it's really useful to bounce between the two modes on a
given chunk of learning to make sure I really understand what I thought I
understood.

Of course, when you first begin programming the computer is annoyingly finicky
about those small chunks; unlike IMs, picky little details like punctuation,
spelling, and syntax demand your attention before you can get experience with
the big pictures.

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akkartik
It's worth trying!

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apsurd
thanks for the encouragement =). I am working on one now for jekyll but it's
not finished yet.

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Mz
Please email me personally when you have something. (Contact info is in my
profile.) This might be useful to my son who bitches endlessly about how
impossible it is to learn code because no one actually explains anything
useful/meaningful. I taught him math conceptually to get past the fact that
numbers don't compute for him and that worked well. If he likes it, I will be
happy to spread the word a smidgeon. I've talked to him a little about HTML
and CSS and he was like "That actually makes sense! No one fucking* tells you
this stuff. You can't find this info on the web. (etc)" But my knowledge of
code is extremely limited.

Thanks.

* Unlike me, my son does not typically swear a blue streak. This tells you how frustrating he finds this.

