I've been trying for a while to learn how to program. Following the cannon of Why Learning to Code is So Hard (http://www.vikingcodeschool.com/posts/why-learning-to-code-is-so-damn-hard), I've been stuck early in the early stages of the Cliff of Confusion for a while.
But, I've heard many times that learning to program by copying (reading and then re-implementing) is a good way to go about it. So, I'd like to know if there are any GitHub projects you can point me toward that I can look at, re-implement, and learn from.
Ideally they would use core functionality of whatever language/platform they're built on, as I've found that most of the projects I am looking at use a ton of outside libraries that I don't know. I'm mainly looking for code that will show me how to use functionality of programming languages to create solutions to questions that the ideas behind the code are based on.
Just FYI: The stack I'm trying to learn is all JavaScript (Node/Express/React), but I'm completely open to examples that I can learn from in any language/platform/framework.
Thanks a ton,
bnb
Honestly, JavaScript is a very confusing language to start with. It's also hard to debug (easy-to-miss scoping issues, silent failures, silent logic errors, etc.) You'll write code that you think will work, and it just won't, and you won't know where to even start.
Go is a decent language for a beginner because it's very explicit (there's very little magic).
Check out this site, which I just discovered on HN: http://howistart.org