Learn Code The Hard Way Blog

Please Don't Become Anything, Especially Not A Programmer

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:25:08 -0700

I'm going to give you a piece of advice when you're trying to learn something new: Never listen to people who try to make beginners feel like losers. For whatever reason, some people get off on making beginners feel like they're worthless for attempting something. Maybe it's because they feel threatened by new entrants, or maybe they were picked on as kids and this makes them feel powerful. Who knows, but generally if they're trying to make you feel like a loser because right now you're not that good at something, then just ignore them. They suck.

I'm Taking Fridays And Saturdays Off

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 10:02:47 -0700

I've been running an experiment for the last month or so where I take "weekends" off from the comments section of the site. This has given me the weekend to relax and also write more chapters for newer books. Typically I'll spend about 2 hours answring comments, and then I'll get in a few hours of writing or coding. On weekends I can get a lot more done for the books.

Using TIOBE To Research My Book Topics

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 11:40:19 -0700

When I sit down to figure out what books to write, it's usually a combination of what I think people will benefit from, or what I see being "in demand" among programmers. In the case of the Regex book it was simply that I saw many of the people who read my Python book could benefit from a book that taught parsing and regular expressions. With the SQL book it was similar, because I saw that many students (and professionals) had a hard time with grasping data design.

Fun Survey About Learning To Code

Mon, 26 Dec 2011 16:33:27 -0800

I'm trying out this service called Urtak.com which let's you post these fun interactive surveys. I'm curious about people learning to code this year, and so I did up a quick survey for it. With Urtak you can ask your own questions and people will answer them. Give it a try.

Trying Out Disqus Comments

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 08:55:06 -0800

This is a quick announcement to say that I'm trying disqus for comments on the books I'm writing and this blog. I'm doing a trial run on just the Command Line Crash Course first. What I'm looking to see is if it makes commenting on the quality of each exercise easier, and if it helps students get their questions answered quicker.

Learn Ruby The Hard Way For Sale

Sat, 12 Nov 2011 14:15:53 -0800

I am pleased to announce that you can buy Learn Ruby The Hard Way in PDF and ePub as of today. The HTML version is still free, and the PDF or ePub is $2.99 with a $5 bundle if you want both in one shot. This is now the same pricing and setup as what I'm doing on Learn Python The Hard Way.

Learn Ruby The Hard Way Back To Sphinx

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 02:35:57 -0700

I spent this week slowly converting Learn Ruby The Hard Way back to Sphinx and now it's finally done and ready to be turned into PDFs. It's now ready and you can read the LRubyTHW book just like before but now with next/prev/index links. The conversion wasn't difficult, just tedious. Rob had to go and convert all the code back into separate .rb files. I then had to go through and convert the text back to RST format, which I did with pandoc. After that I just went through and checked each exercise for errors.

C Half Done, SQL Organized, Regex Started

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:34:25 -0700

In the month or so since I started working mostly full time on writing books, I've managed to start this site, get Ruby and Python organized, and I started working on the topics I wanted to hit. As of today I now have the start for a number of books that cover useful topics beginners want and need to learn, and my goal is to have a bunch of books and courses up. Here's a quick status update on what I've been doing and what's coming in the future.

Started The New LxTHW Site

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 05:03:53 -0700

I finally got a site template and the guts of this site going so I can start publishing and working on my next title, "Learn C The Hard Way". The purpose of this site is to act as a place for me to blog about learning to code, writing my books, and clearly to pimp the hell out of them. Hopefully people who are interested in the work I'm doing to teach coding will get a kick out of it.