What is the best way to learn coding?

[Jason]

I think everyone would have to agree that "doing the coding" is the best way. Well, I mean, hands-on. Anyhow, though, along with that, what are the better ways to learn? Do you feel classes help? Do you like self-help books like those "Learn a Coding Language in 24 Hours" stuff?

 

[Jamie]

Learning by doing is definitely the way here. More specifically, learning by breaking things and trying to understand why something doesn't work.

Otherwise the other thing I suggest is looking for projects in your target language and just learn by reading the code. There's no shortage of open source projects on GitHub so you will most definitely find something suitable. (I used to look through "awesome-" lists on GH because they would often point you at good projects to look at).

Books are ok, but they become out dated quickly. So rather than looking at books that teach you a coding language you're probably better reading those around software architecture practices instead.

 

[Arantor]

You can read all you like, you can watch videos all you like but literally nothing is a substitute for *doing*. Not even immersing yourself in the language you're targeting is really good enough because there will be an awful lot of 'why does this work this way'.

The other reality is that a lot of tutorials and guides are... often inaccurate, often gloss over key concepts and often don't teach you how to build things but how to build a specific thing without explaining how it really works. I've lost count of the 'let's build a blog' tutorials I've seen over the years that don't really explain how any of it works so all you've learned is how to build a blog, not any of the concepts about why any of it actually does anything.

I recently did an intro course to Godot on Zenva. So many concepts badly and incompletely explained, to the point where none of the 'why we are doing it this way' is explained, and some of the things they encouraged had results that made sense to me but wouldn't to other people because of things not readily explained. Heck, one of the quiz sections in the course asked questions that the entire course doesn't cover at all, and that unless you were already fluent in another language you'd only ever be able to guess the answer.

The only thing I would say is that as much as I'll always advocate learn by doing, the one headache you won't avoid with this technique is the 'it doesn't work, why doesn't it work' roadblock. Solving this can be non-obvious and often best done with someone who does know what's going on.