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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

I tried to get started with programming with books. But I just didn't seem to be getting anything, I'd read the chapters and not really learn or understand it. What really worked was interactive education like Codecademy and some others I have forgotten the name of.

Reading a small paragraph and then immediately putting it in to action made everything clear far better than books did.

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It's fascinating the different ways human minds work and learn. I'm the same way.

It also shows up in other areas like language learning where some people prefer classes and grammar books, and others prefer to just learn via exposure to a lot of content.

I think this is probably just the common experience. Programming is probably best learned hands on rather than through a book, which is why the use of programming books has fallen off a cliff once we got other options. Even before AI I think programming books had already fallen off in popularity.

There would be some things books can provide that are probably better than other options, but for a lot of hands on skills it seems best to learn in a hands on way.

Maybe, I haven't looked into it too much, but among the people with a preference for classroom and textbook based learning there does seem to be a large degree of fear of failure, which influences what might otherwise be a different natural preference. Fear of failure is exacerbated by making mistakes in public, but it seems to even apply when nobody is there to observe someone making mistakes.

I used to read a constant stream of magazines before such books became more widely available, and then just read the books and knew the language. I could read APL after reading a pick and write C after reading the book.

Different people learn differently and not everyone needs to type something in to learn it.

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