Ask HN: Self-Study or Take a Class in Programming?

[zds]

I'm a college student pursuing liberal arts studies (econ/political science). I know the basics of CSS and HTML but I want to eventually be able to work on web applications. I've read a lot here about various different learning methods with past Ask HN posts and I'm curious if any of you have opinions on what's better for a new programmer, the classroom environment or self-studying.

The introductory courses at my university are taught with Java. As my academic aims lie outside of CS (and may change depending on my future programming experience), I thought it might be advantageous to learn programming extracurricularly through OpenCourseWare. Have any of you had experience with both? What did you find to be better? If you had the opportunity to take a classroom course, would you?

Thanks to all of you.

[kunqiana]

I was on the same route as you (in arts) however, recently I switched to Computer Science and math and took arts as extracurricular instead. If you really want to be good at programming it is probably best to take programming classes because it forces you to focus and learn faster. Hacking by yourself might be fun with no pressure, but you will need to fill a lot of gaps all by yourself (unless you have been hacking for a long time, you probably don't even need a cs degree). Then again, since you want to do web application, it doesn't need a lot of the theory that a cs degree demands. So you might want to see if your school offers programming intensive classes and try those. The reason I switched is because my school restrict arts students from taking math and cs courses (plus I didn't enjoy arts courses very much). If your school has no such restriction you can probably consider taking lots of programming classes.