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Ankita Singhal
Ankita Singhal

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How to start learning a new programming language?

What are the various techniques and methodologies you follow when you start to learn a new programming language? What are some of the best sources of tutorials you follow and dig into?

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Hakan Damar

It depends on your background and expertise level.
Usually most of us do DB-related programming. I mean, there's always data, and we need to manage it according to business logic. The basic language usually gives you data structures, data access options, template engines.You need to send, collect, verify, manage and save or process the data. All these steps are only to generate the expected result. When you start developing an application 25% language and 75% frameworks kills you. I think frameworks will take most of your time, not the programming languages. ;)

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Ankita Singhal

Yes true. With so many languages and frameworks and libraries (talking mostly in frontend context) being introduced every day, its difficult to keep up.

How you you suggest one should go about learning a framework. Any tips tricks or approach you follow ?

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Matteo Nunziati • Edited

If the language is close to others I know (eg not a functional one), I search for a cheetsheet and for a real life small project to work with. That's it. You do not need much more, the most of the time -as stated in other comments- is consumed by frameworks and their (lack of) docs.

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Ankita Singhal

Do do you create a new small project of your own to learn? I usually struggle with what to create for a new project. With the idea. Any suggestions ? :)

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Matteo Nunziati

50% of a code is design, 50% is technology. I usually reimplement some small pieces of SW I develop at work. So the design part is limited to the approach required by the tech.

On front end I have the mighty push-a-button-to-show-a-modal-with-a-table-which-has-to-return-the-underlying-object-associated-with-the-selected-table-row-to-the-main-view.

This let you check e.g. widgets, reusable components (1 widget per table, 1 per modal, 1 per main page), events/callbacks.

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Ankita Singhal

Wow...

I really like you " push-a-button-to-show-a-modal-with-a-table-which-has-to-return-the-underlying-object-associated-with-the-selected-table-row-to-the-main-view" idea.

This is a good approach when you want to learn a new language but usually are out of ideas as to what to develop so as to be able to grasp basic yet important concepts of the language.