Tale of how to study computer science

This article focuses primarily on those who want to start learning programming, but does not have the opportunity to pay for this training.

There are quite a lot of articles written on this topic on Habré, here are some of them: Why the grass is green, and programmers are cool , How to become a Java programmer , Program from scratch. “Now” is the right time to start . Learning to program becomes more difficult .

In the yard in 2019. Now, each uncle Vasya Gikbreyns, netology, Hekslet, html-academy from the village of Pupkino considers it his duty to teach you to program in Python for a reasonable fee or make a website on the WordPress in 5 minutes. Most modern online programming learning platforms usually have free introductory courses (which will tell you which tag to insert a picture on a website, or teach you to display “Hello World” in Java, but no more).

In order to learn something other than the importance of closing a paragraph tag in HTML or to learn about such clever words like “Angular” or “SVG” you will have to pay the money already. Of course, I understand that they (like everyone in our mortal world) need to monetize their resources in this way, but having paid for a monthly subscription or having completed several courses on the same html academy, you will not know and be able to do more than if you read a couple of weighty books on a topic, or flipped through official documentation and practiced independently, and any more or less serious employer has these courses listed a little worse than a diploma from any Tyumen Industrial University (that is, in any way).


Additional 4 hours with a mentor cost 12,000 rubles. Mentor will be much more comfortable if you sign up for exactly this course option, whether you feel more comfortable is another question.


If you still want to spend money on something directly related to programming, it is better to spend it on buying a Sublime Text 3 license (I feel like Atom or Brackets evangelists have already moved the cursor over the minus of my karma). You will no longer see a window asking for a purchase, after every ten presses of Ctrl + S, and the company that produces the most nimble, convenient and functional code editor will become $ 80 richer.

There are many excellent courses on coursera , edx or codeacademy . In my opinion, these are the few resources that deserve attention if you really want to gain knowledge. On edx, it is possible to do all courses by audit, i.e. completely free of charge (there is also an opportunity to receive a certificate upon completion of training for $ 100, but I think that the sales figure for these certificates is the same as for the licensed versions of Windows in Russia, that is, it tends to zero).



And about the knowledge of English for learning programming on foreign resources: if your level of English is so low that it does not even allow you to read w3schools.com or watch the new video on The Coding Train channel, then I don’t know how you work as an electrician in the village of Pogorelka in the Tyumen region Why are you basically interested in learning programming? Well, seriously, shame, for a person who is interested in the IT sphere, it is a shame not to have an Intermediate level today, comrades! In extreme cases, it is always possible to click on the blue arrow on the Google translator page. But what is really there, in Chrome there is the possibility of instant translation of the page into Russian.


I have a very positive attitude to learning how to program from books. O'Reilly alone releases them a year more than the number of people starting to learn programming, and after a week giving up learning. My advice: do not be lazy to do the exercises after reading each chapter (they may seem too trivial, but practice makes perfect , a person remembers information through repetition much more efficiently).


Piracy is a topic for individual discussions with 100,500 comments, but when it comes to the learning process, this can be (at least partially) justified. I do not urge you to download e-books from Flibusta programming books, but if you don’t have the opportunity to buy them at the moment, then the free (yet, to a certain extent) Internet will offer you a lot of ways to solve this problem.


In the end, I would like to advise you to stop reading hundreds of articles about how to start learning programming, and finally start learning (he himself has sinned, so I know what I'm writing about). You should not expect instant results; studying in principle is far from a linear process. You will make a lot of mistakes on the simplest tasks, there will be a desire to quit the whole thing regularly, but do not despair, continue, changing, perhaps, the pace of learning, and you will experience an enormous sense of satisfaction .