怎样学习编程

Paul Graham 在 Hackers and Painters 一文中建议，可以参考学习绘画的方式:

• learn by doing

  One thing we can learn, or at least confirm, from the example of painting is how to learn to hack. You learn to paint mostly by doing it. Ditto for hacking. Most hackers don't learn to hack by taking college courses in programming. They learn to hack by writing programs of their own at age thirteen.

• learn from examples

  Hackers, likewise, can learn to program by looking at good programs-- not just at what they do, but the source code too.

Peter Norvig 在 Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years 中建议：

• Get interested.

• The best kind of learning is learning by doing.

  the maximal level of performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained automatically as a function of extended experience, but the level of performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate efforts to improve.

  the most effective learning requires a well-defined task with an appropriate difficulty level for the particular individual, informative feedback, and opportunities for repetition and corrections of errors.

• Talk with other programmers; read other programs. This is more important than any book or training course.
• 科班教育不是必需的（因此，MIT challenge 恐怕不是学编程的好方法）
• Work on projects with other programmers.
• Work on projects after other programmers.
• Learn at least a half dozen programming languages.
• 了解电脑的运行，”Know how long it takes your computer to execute an instruction, …”
• Get involved in a language standardization effort.
• Have the good sense to get off the language standardization effort as quickly as possible.

其中最重要的第2、3条与 Paul Graham 的建议惊人地相似。