alt Hacker NewsNot true for everyone. I learned Rust from The Rust Programming Language ("The Rust Book") and "Rust for Rustaceans." Sure, coming from C/C++, I could have learned the syntax online but learning best idioms and styles required the time and commitment to read a book cover-to-cover. In fact, I've probably read each page in "Rust for Rustaceans" at least twice to ensure that I understood some of the more subtle points. I could have developed a half-baked notion of how the borrow-checker worked by fooling around and reading blurbs on Stack Exchange. But Rust for Rustaceans made clear the more subtle points that might have taken years of tinkering to understand. Thank goodness people still write excellent books on computer programming.
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Getting a book is my goto to learn anything new. I taught myself PHP and ended up finding a book 4 years later when I was looking for an answer to something. On the next page was something that would have saved me tons of time so I read the whole book.
Since then I’ve read books on Ruby, Go, Elixir, Docker, K8s and a lot more. By far the best way to get a semi complete understanding of anything without scraping together data from the internet yourself, because you won’t easily know the gaps.
- PAIP - The Art of of the Metaobject Protocol - Modern C
Those alone are the ones I've been re-reading this year.
It was my first book and introduced me to the No Starch Press aesthetic no other line has managed to replicate.
I came here to say almost the same thing. I've been learning rust in my free time because I don't do enough programming at work to scratch that itch any more, and I've been using the rust book as a reference.
Thanks for the rec for "rust for rustaceans" I'll have a look into it.
I've only been using chatgpt for points where i'd normally go ask another dev for another set of eyes to debug something, otherwise all my learning and doing has been mostly the rust book, crates, and blogs about rust, ecs, roguelikes etc etc. It's been so fun!
My method is to get some hands-on experience first with the technology: Tutorials, Getting Started pages, the first chapter of a book. The fumble for some time and getting exposed to various sources of information. Then I take a book and skim it from start to cover, stopping at interesting bits. Then I reread various parts.
Sometimes I start with reading the books. But I already known I won't retain anything deeply. But it will gives me all the right keywords to learn more about the technology.
It always amaze me when I see fellow programmers struggle with problems that could have been solved easily by just reading that introductory book on the subject.
I have a gut feeling that human as a creature learns better when looking at the information from several different angles, both physically and mentally. Been physically I mean looking at the same concept on screen and on hard copy books, perhaps taking notes and mark relevent sentences with a highlighter. Similarly, seeing a concept on physical book and write some short code snippet is viewing the concept from different mental angles. Though I don't have a proof for that and have yet to find a formal research on this topic.