
Ask HN: How to help someone learn to code? - mxab
My girlfriend is currently struggling with some courses that require a basic understanding of how to write code. It&#x27;s not so much that she can&#x27;t learn the syntax of whatever language is used, her difficulties start at a lower level, i.e. at what one might call algorithmic thinking.<p>I&#x27;m having a hard time helping and explaining these things to her, so I was wondering whether someone here knows some literature or MOOCs or tricks or whatever that focuses on teaching total beginners, ideally in a language-agnostic way.<p>Thanks for any help!
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GreenItalics
I've been helping some friends learn programming, and they probably wouldn't
describe themselves as algorithmic thinkers. What I found was a good starting
point was talking about basic boolean logic and truth tables. The topic was
really straightforward, felt foundational and there are tons of examples in
all kinds of topics.

From there, we started talking about simple circuits/gates like AND, OR, etc.
Then we started talking binary (and other bases), then binary arithmetic. At
the end, I went over how integers are stored from a high level (and integer
overflow for fun :) ).

There really wasn't a super high-level plan, but exposure to these topics I
felt was a great intro to the mindset and we had good fun/progression during
the session. From here, with booleans & integers as the foundation, I might
feel comfortable writing pseudo-code and such with them, slowly bringing the
abstraction higher.

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charliex
Hey, I recommend her to try interactive coding course at BitDegree. It is
suitable for absolute beginners. This was my first completed coding course. It
is very engaging and easy to learn. Hope she will love it too. Here is a link:
[https://www.bitdegree.org/course/coding-for-beginners-
space-...](https://www.bitdegree.org/course/coding-for-beginners-space-doggos)

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otras
Is she looking for a full course? If so, I highly, highly recommend Harvard's
online CS50. Tremendous course, and I think it gives a really great foundation
for algorithmic thinking.

If she's looking for something a little less intense, MIT's Intro to
Programming w/ EdX is also a great way to learn more about problem solving,
and since it's in python it's a little more approachable.

Both are free and online, and I highly recommend either of them.

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Theophraustous
I've taught a few friends the basics by using codecademy's free javascript
course while also tutoring. Unless they've changed it, it has you build a
simple console cash register. It introduces each of it's concepts very
organically, & if they get stuck on any of javascript's idiosyncrasies I'm
there.

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sloaken
If you want them to learn to think about how to develop code, but not a
particular language I recommend: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-
fundamentals](https://www.coursera.org/learn/programming-fundamentals)

