Category: Tutorials

Within the next few months, I’m going to develop an open source crypto-currency application for fun. Unfortunately, this will require me to pick up programming languages that I’m not familiar with. Those being Solidity, C++, Scala and Python. In an effort to streamline the learning process, I created a simple guide to learn each language within 20 hours of cramming.

Here’s my approach.

20 hour challenge

1. [ ] (1 hour) Get an overview of the features and use cases.
   Search for a site that compares your target programming language against one of the top 3.

   Ex.
   Googled “C++ vs Java” and found this wiki.

2. [ ] (max 6 hours) Watch a few video tutorials over the language.
   Look around youtube.com (FREE), udemy.com ($) or pluralsight.com ($$) for tutorials.
   NOTE: Watch at 2x playback speed.

   Ex. searched youtube.com for “C++ tutorial” and filtered for longer than 20 minutes
   

3. [ ] (max 2 hours) Find best IDE and set it up
   Search reddit.com for “Best IDE” + programming language.
   Ex.
   reddit.com: “What’s the most recommended C IDE to use”

4. [ ] (1 hour) Bookmark most useful sites for API documentation
   devdocs.io has a strong chance of being the consistent winner.

   Ex.
   DevDocs.io: C++ Vector

5. [ ] (2 hour) Print out and review cheat sheets

   Learn x in y minutes is the first site I checkout for cheat sheets.

   Ex.
   – Learn C++ in Y Minutes:

   Googled “C++ Cheatsheets”
   – C++: http://web.pa.msu.edu/people/duxbury/courses/phy480/Cpp_refcard.pdf

6. [ ] (1 hour) Explore the source code and structure of featured open source projects on github.com in that language.
   Use the advance search on github.com to find the top projects in that language.
   Ex.
   Github search for a C++ project with more than 1,000 stars

7. [ ] (max 8 hours) Start a weekend side project or compete in a coding challenge website
   Get some side project ideas from https://github.com/karan/Projects

   You can find a list of coding challenge websites here.

   codewars.com is a good site to try out.

   I hope this works.

   

   Larry Battle

   I love to program, and discover new tech. Check out my <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/users/527776/larry-battle">stackoverflow</a> and <a href="https://github.com/LarryBattle">github</a> accounts.

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