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Comment by dvcc | Hacker News Reader

Do people really find language-specific books helpful in better understanding a programming language long-term? Without ever implementing something, I don't think my memory would hang on to some language feature for long.

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This is why I love Big Nerd Ranch for learning mobile dev. All of their books are completely focused on building one or two projects from start to finish and teaching you things about the API, dev environment, and best practices as you go. Usually at the end of each chapter there's also a "why" which explains why you had to do the seemingly obscure thing you just did so you're not just copy-pasting code.

Yeah, I rarely read books anymore aside from hunting down very specific knowledge. For example, I recently bought a PDF on using Netty since I find it hard to figure out from scratch.

But language books? I don't really see the value beyond the beginner level. Every a-ha moment for me comes from building something out of my comfort level and then reading other people's approach to the same sort of solution.

The language-specific books have always been helpful in getting me to discern whether I'm making a syntax error or a logical error. When it comes to implementation, I lose interest very quickly if it's something that has already been done reasoning that I can just use someone else's implementation.

So this way, I "fill in the blanks" with what I want to implement, knowing that an error or unexpected behavior is entirely my misunderstanding of the logic and not my misunderstanding of the language.

The best ones are those that have projects at the end of each chapter that incorporate what you've just learned. But yeah, I feel that books are mainly just for jumpstarting into a language, and don't help terribly much in the long-term. It can help with solving problems in the most sensible way for the language, but otherwise it's best to just hammer on a project.

I like to read language-specific books initially to ramp up quickly. Though, my goal is to get to actually building something as fast as possible. The books just make it easy to quickly grab the basics.

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