I'm having trouble learning [closed]

Question

I'm only 13 but i'm genuinely interested in CS and would really like it if I could actually accomplish it. I've read books on C++ and C#, but ALL of them are the same!! They all say "Ok so since you have no prior knowledge in this what so ever, write a snippet that will do this and then make a GUI and then throw it into the Priafdhsu hfad then add the program and then program your own compiler to do some stuff". It's really getting annoying.

I've payed near $40 (via Paypal) on ebooks that supposedly taught people to program with no prior knowledge. ALL OF THEM EXPECT ME TO ALREADY KNOW THE LANGUAGE. Is there something that I'm missing or am I suppose to be born with the property of CS?

I would very much appreciate it if someone could explain this to me or possibly refer me to a tutorial on Programming Theory that starts from below ground zero as I have know knowledge in CS at all.

Answer 1

I think that a perfectly gentle introduction to the computing in general for someone not in the field is Feynman Lectures on Computation. I think it's a brilliant book because it only concerns itself with some of the essence of what makes up the discipline of computing, both the theoretical and engineering aspects. It's minimalist, spartan even, but is focused on conveying the feel of it. I enjoyed some 20+ years after writing the first line of code :) Your library system should have it. I've found that librarians like Feynman, at least ones in our metro systems.

Answer 2

Some suggested reading for you...

To Get Your Hands Dirty

Books to Read

• Learn Code the Hard Way series (they are online and free!)

  • Learn Python the Hard Way

    The one that started it, and Python probably is a good language for you to get started at your age, as it may be more fun and less constraining than other languages, while being very expressive and powerful: definitely a good choice to get into programming).

  • Learn Ruby the Hard Way

    Might actually be even more appropriate for you, as Ruby is an extremely fun language to play with, and extremely fast to pick up! That being said, I tend to find that people develop a few bad habits with Ruby, that will them be hard to shake off and that might hinder their learning of other languages. Still, if motivation is one of your issues, then Ruby might be even better than Python in your case.

  • Learn C the Hard Way

    That being said, I'm a strong defender of C and of its importance for programmers. Still think it's a bit early to tackle it, but doable, and this book could help you (though I haven't used it, to be honest, but it does get you from basics to more complicated stuff without assuming much). I don't think your age really is the issue to learn C in any way, but it does impose a lot of constraints and it does take TIME to learn, LOTS OF TIME to master, and a decent amount of TIME to do even somewhat simple things sometimes, in comparison with what we know call high-level languages (a label C once had itself, back in the fun days of machine code and assembly).

• Learn Yourself a Haskell For Great Good

  OK, I expect many people will say maybe I shouldn't point you to that one, for many (some potentially valid) reasons. But you may like it, and if you do it can get you places. It can also spoil you for life and make you look down on all other languages afterwards, but mostly it can teach you some cool stuff and make you see what powerful languages can do.

• Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby

  Also a very fun guide to get started with.

Environments to Experiment

• Try some REPLs:

  • Lord of the REPLs is a good place to toy online with several languages,

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Computer Science?

You mentioned CS, not progamming nor software engineering. This means theoretical stuff as well, though you seemed more enclined to see the practical aspects from what I gathered from your question.

Eventually, you really should get into these theoretical stuff, but it's hard to find resources that aren't borderline (if not extremely) boring. That's not the case for some of them, but many of the references and textbooks are pretty... well, compact, solid and dangerous to hit people in the face with. Doesn't mean they're bad, they may just not an example of good pedagogy. Plus, some day, you might come across something and from a deep and dusty corner of your memory you'll remember there was something about it it one of these books that are more akin to bricks than to guides. That's what they're for, though with today's online resources, that's a bit less relevant.

Some of my favourite reads are:

• Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming

  Pretty heavy book, but not that unreadable. I find it actually really clear. However, it does have a relatively unusual approach to teaching things, and doesn't shy away from advanced concept. The good side is that it covers a very wide area of things.

• Operating Systems: Design and Implemtation, by Tanenbaum and Hull

this is a work in progress, will keep editing this answer

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It's Not Just by Programming...

... that you get interested in programming. Maybe some other stuff can get your motivation going. These are amazing books to inspire you to do great things and learn how others got into it before you, and built and modelled the computers and their systems you use today.

For more on this, read my answer (and others') to What are some things you have read that inspired and guided you as a programmer?, where I detail this a lot more. But my top-list for this would be:

• Books (both hyper inspirational, extremely educative, and deeply humbling):
  • Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, by Steven Levy;
  • Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, by Michael Hitzlik;
• Essays:
  • Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years, by Peter Norvig;
  • Many Coding Horror articles and posts.

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A Personal (and Cautionary) Tale...

Hmm, sorry, that part got way longer than I originally planned.

I got into computers when I was about 10, in a time where they were not as accessible as now, in your case (and they were still a LOT more accessible than for some of my older peers, of just a few years... we live a fast-paced era, in terms of technology advances). I got into "programming" (yes, quotes, and I'll bet you a beer - when you reach legal drinking age wherever you are - you'll use some yourself in retrospect in a few years) shortly afterwards, after having broken my first computer a few times and provoked a few blunders.

I had a first contact with some LOGO (though at the time I didn't know it was LOGO) early in primary school (actually, was 7 at the time, I think), and that got me thinking I liked to know how that stuff worked and what else that damn turtle could do. Later, when our family got a computer, I got my hands on QBasic, Windows .BAT files, had to understand why different games would require different kinds of memory to accept to run, and slowly discovered HTML and later JavaScript when the Internet made its entrance (CSS wasn't even in the picture). I got decently good at that, though not exceptional, and for some reason got very interested in some areas of IT: security, operating systems, more serious programming languages.

And here's the point of this (wow, already lengthy) anecdote: though I was extremely motivated at the time to learn, I did pick up at the time things that were too big to chew for me, I have to admit. Maybe I could have learned them, had I had the right things at hand (again, the internet was a bit less wide-spread at the time...). But I failed at some things back then that I excel at nowadays.

I remember trying to learn C, without even quite knowing much about it and without even having a development environment at the time, because I wanted to understand the stuff I saw in these funky Phrack and 2600 articles, for instance (oh yes, I wanted to play with the stack for fun and profit too, but mostly for fun... gimme...). I just wasn't ready, and didn't quite manage to do anything with that, as I didn't even have any environment at hand to do this, or didn't know where to find one (also, I'm not English native, so back then that considerably reduced the pool of online-resources to look for).

I also remember that I went to a class trip to England carrying with me a huge Java 1.2 book. I still have it somewhere. Worst book ever, won't even mention it. It was so bad and so unpractical, and full of things now recognized as bad practices. But maybe, had I known a bit more and had more experience, would it have taught me something. But quite frankly it didn't. Read the thing cover to cover, tried to run examples, tried to write my own stuff, but it assumed I knew some principles that I hadn't seen until now (Object Oriented programming isn't exacly a staple of BASIC, for instance, and so weren't really the Observer Pattern and event-driven APIs like Java's Swing). I gave up, and funnily enough years later I picked up Java in just a few days, remembering some of this (and not even needing that book), because in-between I had properly learned other stuff. And failed at learning other ones.

In-between, I had an high-school optional class for programming, where we mostly did Pascal and Delphi. It was a bit of an half-baked class, to be honest (plus, it was done in German, which also isn't my native language, so that didn't quite help, I guess), but the guy was interesting and that was still programming... even though sometimes it was programming on paper... Ah the joy of losing points because you forgot a semi-colon (son of a gun...). And, well, early Pascal was easy to pick up, because I knew BASIC well and had a read a herd of other stuff, but other stuff hit me in the face. Hmm, recursion to do Koch's snow-flake? What the heck is that? Multiple recursions? You're dreaming, boss... And then early attempts at using Delphi introduced me to a concept I'd really only fully grasp later: pointers (mostly one of the reason why C is important to learn, and also mostly one of the reasons why it may not be the best to start with for you right now). I think the German didn't help at all here, when the guy used to speak about "Hut"s for the Pascal/Delphi pointer sign and so forth... :) They say communication is everything, well, that's not only for marriage.

But, despite these road-blocks, I learned some stuff, was still interested, and when I entered a software engineering school right adter high-school I knew a bunch of stuff. I didn't let it go to my head and think I already knew much, and instead pretty much assumed I knew nothing to really force myself to learn the basics with my peers, and keeping in mind most of what I had taught myself may have been wrong. And every now and then, some concept I had to learn made sense because of something had learned back then. Sometimes I thought I must had been a dumb-ass to not get it back then from the get-go, and sometimes I realized why I didn't. To everyone their own pace.

I had even started to get interested, for some odd reason, in operating systems (maybe for the security aspects, I recall). In particular, I got my hands on a QNX copy, which at the time was previewing a new version of Real Time Operating System based on their brand new Neutrino microkernel. Didn't know shit, didn't know C, wasn't quite sure why the kernel was different or what RTOS or POSIX implied, but figured it looked way cool to be able to play with that, and it was a UNIX. Finally had something I could write C on, and it had this amazing operating system and kernel, this different user interface called Photon, and it did that thing called "real time" which didn't quite make sense to me back then. So I bought the books on the QNX Neutrino Architecture and the QNX Programming Guide by Rob Krten and... well, failed to grasp most of it because my general knowledge of Operating Systems, of C, of kernel design (and of English, quite simply) wasn't well established enough at the time.

And years later, when I had an operating systems course, suddenly I was one of the rare guys who knew QNX, or even what the words microkernel and real-time meant. And I could go back to this book and read it with a deeper understanding. And you know what? Just a few years after that, I was an assistant on a course for Operating System Programming AND a lecturer on Embedded Systems Programming, showing off QNX (and other competing RTOS) to my students.

The time difference between when I bought that QNX book and that class I gave? About 15 years. Looks like a lot of time for you (longer than your life) but it simultaneously seems like a very short time for me (it's less than half my life as of the time of this writing in 2012). Time difference between when I actually started to program (day one of my university, not when I dabbled in it when I was your age) and this course was pretty much 5 years.

I failed to learn basic stuff when I could have grasped them, and understood some ahead of my time. Probably learned more from the failures. Most importantly, even when I failed, I built some degree of understanding of an area, and some general knowledge about something.

And you know what, as dumb as it sounds, that's how you get an expert at something: by sucking at it, failing at it, over and over, time and time again, picking up pieces here and there. Until you finally totally get it... and still suck at other stuff you can now try to improve.

Bottom line, don't sweat it. I was very eager to learn back then, but didn't know where to look. So I tried to look everywhere, and try to do everything. Which is fine. But know this: I failed!! Very happily, but I failed. And so will you... until some day. And I'm sure many people will recognize themselves in this scenario.

Keep having fun, don't get frustrated by the books, and if that's really what you like doing, you'll have picked up a lot of things without realizing it.

So... keep failin'.

Answer 3

First of all, rather than approaching a language, try approaching a problem. What is it that you want to make or solve?

Second, find someone you can learn that unsaid stuff from. Books are a great reference and, sometimes, guide but are no substitute for a mentor. I bet you could find an after-school program in your local computer lab. I did that when I was your age. Actually, I figured out how to break from the program we were learning on our Apple IIe's, to a prompt, and was inspired to learn BASIC that ran it.

BASIC is a great way to start but, nowadays, I'd almost say Javascript is a perfect starter. Hit F12 in most modern browsers and you've got an instant sandbox. Start playing with code from tutorials in the console and you'll see magic stuff happen on the page. Hopefully, that'll inspire you to figure out how to make your thing, and pretty soon you'll know a programming language. No books, just lots of tutorials, forum posts, and language references... and, of course, Stack Exchange!

Good luck.

Answer 4

"How to Design Programs" is the book you're looking for. It combines a gentle introduction to CS theory and discrete math with concrete programming tasks. The language used, PLT Scheme/Racket, may not be widely used in industry, but it will introduce you to key programming language ideas.

Racket, the dialect of scheme developed by this team, was designed with students your age in mind. Racket says

In parallel, the team started conducting workshops for high school teachers, training them in program design and functional programming. Field tests with these teachers and their students provided essential clues for the direction of the development.

Over the following years, PLT added teaching languages, an algebraic stepper,[15] a transparent read-eval-print loop, a constructor-based printer, and many other innovations to DrScheme, producing an application-quality pedagogic program development environment. By 2001, the core team (Felleisen, Findler, Flatt, Krishnamurthi) had also written and published their first textbook, How to Design Programs, based on their teaching philosophy.

Answer 5

In your particular situation the disappointment came from contrast. You spent significant effort, money and time, doing 2 attempts in a row and falling behind your peers. No rewards after large spendings. It is perfectly OK, because you chose really hard targets.

So best way to learn, for you, is possibly to take lower risk path. Find smallest isolated platform you can program and start with it. Say, if you can borrow a programmable calculator for free and write a 5 lines program.

While writing this small program do not start next project until you completely in precise details understand what every instruction does. What parts, states are involved. Understand it perfectly, find answers to absolutely every question raised.

After completing it, you will wonder what every possible instruction does. There should not be too many of them. May be 40-50. Understand them at least half way.

After having done 2-3 projects, you will realise: I can express every given problem in code in this particular language. That is how every programmer feels if he/she is a programmer.

Answer 6

I'm only 13 but i'm genuinely interested in CS and would really like it if I could actually accomplish it. I've read books on C++ and C#

Well, here's your first mistake. CS has practically nothing whatsoever to do with the actual programming of non-trivial programs. Once you get past the "What's the fastest algorithm" stage, that's pretty much it. Software Engineering and Computer Science are not particularly related fields- pick one and go for it.

Answer 7

Well, you could try Java instead. If you have some idea what a variable or a loop is, Head First Java is a fabulous resource.