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Aadesh Shrestha
Aadesh Shrestha

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How do you approach when you are learning new language ?

I usually go through the basic examples in the beginning and go through the language's documentation to see what the methods are doing.

How do you approach when you are learning the new language?
How effective have they been for you ?

Top comments (4)

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jvarness profile image
Jake Varness

I think the hardest thing when learning a new language is not knowing what to do with the newfound knowledge.

Sometimes I try to implement projects that I've done in the past but by using a different technology. For example, I wanted to learn Angular and TypeScript as well as deploying to Heroku, so I wrote the Tour of Heroes Tutorial and put it out on Github. I want to learn React, so I'm trying to implement the same thing but this time in React.

If you're trying to just get basic language features down, try going to Project Euler and try to implement the solutions to the problems listed on that site, but using the language you want (there are like... hundreds, so you'll be able to keep yourself pretty busy). I started solving problems for fun just so I could learn Go and Dart. I might even try to use other languages to solve those problems too.

The biggest thing for me is to have an end-goal in mind, and not one that's too lofty. Set goals for yourself that don't take more than a day to accomplish, otherwise you might get burned out on spinning your wheels trying to solve problems with your code. Those small victories can amount to a lot over time! Once you get bored with those small victories, start making more lofty goals for yourself like making mobile/cloud deployed apps.

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Ali Spittel

When I was newer to programming, I would do a bunch of tutorials -- usually through video -- on the topic. That was super important at that stage in my career, since I was still somewhat learning how to code period!

Now that I've been doing this for longer, I can usually pick up a new skill by just looking at a couple example scripts written with that tool or language. Then I challenge myself to build something using the tool's documentation. If all goes according to plan, I'm at a pretty good point after that! If something is more difficult for me -- like Elm was recently -- I then go and watch video tutorials and read articles for deeper understanding on the topic.

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João Cerqueira

I usually go through the getting started walkthroughs and getting to be more familiar with the syntax by experimenting writing simple applications or use cases.

In the meantime, one of the first things I search is the "do's and dont's" of that particular language, or best practices, so that I'm sure I'm doing it right from the beginning (so I don't get bad habits).

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jj profile image
Juan Julián Merelo Guervós

I look for a particular application. Most usually it's an evolutionary algorithm, but it could be a Telegram bot or a web service. Then I try to get a basic tutorial, if that fails I get a book, and if that fails I simply look sentence by sentence and usually end up in Stack Overflow.