Ask HN: Learning resources for a noob?

[testertesting]

Hi everyone,

I understand this question has been asked before but can't find an acceptable article. Maybe I'm setting my standards too high. If there are any resources that you know of or an article that I should be looking at then please let me know. It would be highly appreciated.

Being relatively new to this coding lark and have only brushed over basic HTML, CSS, etc. in the past - although untouched for 2 years now - I'm now wanting to get back on the horse and perhaps expand into C# territory.

Thanks in advance,

A

[brudgers]

The natural companion for 'HTML, CSS, etc.' is JavaScript. The reasons I might consider recommending it to a 'noob' is the wide availability of diverse learning material. The wide availability of diverse learning material is also a reason I might not recommend it...there's a lot of outdated advice, advice with relevance in limited contexts, advice that matters at Facebook scale, ever changing trends, etc.

On the other hand, the reason I might recommend C# is that the community all tends to row in the same direction (relative to Javascript). On the other hand, there is a lot of outdated C# and it is more common for C# learning material to assume a professional enterprise development context.

If the goal is to 'just learn some programming', I'd suggest playing with several languages. Among the the languages that:

1. Have a very easy to set up development environment,

2. Have canonical interesting, well written 'noob' material,

3. Likely to spark a new way of thinking about computational processes,

4. Consciously provide good separation of 'noob' from experienced professional materials.

Are Racket, J, Forth, and Processing. There are others.

Good luck.

[testertesting → brudgers]

Thanks for the information. I'll look into it this week and see how I get on.

[mtmail]

A couple of articles will probably not be enough for C#. I recommend books as boring as that may sound.

The awesome-<insert programming language> repositories are full of good hints once you're passed the basic language syntax, one can spend weeks reading. https://github.com/quozd/awesome-dotnet

[testertesting → mtmail]

I've got this bookmarked for when I'm at the right level. Thank you.