Libervisco

Reading the Programming Groundup book I have skimmed down to the last chapter just out of the curiosity. That's where I read the authors suggestion that it is best for an aspiring programmer not to leave out any of the three methods of learning as well as not to ever stop learning.

The three methods he describes are:

- from bottom up (the very Programming Groundup which teaches some assembly language is an example) - from the lowest levels up to the higher
- from middle out - the specific programming languages at hand
- from the top down - starting with the easiest and than digging deeper

To all programmers, which method was (and is) your favourite? Which was the best for you and which method do you consider the best?

Have you went by all three of them and all in all, how long did it take you to be able to make your own first little program of any significance?

I am reading the Programming Groundup book and thus obviously going by the "bottom up" method currently. I am not however sure if I'll keep it up through out the whole book (I do intend to, but I'm not sure), but I believe it will certainly be of great help to at least get to know the way all that functions on the lowest level, even though I wouldn't be skilled to do any significant programming on that level. After this book, I'll probably go about reading a book on some specific languges (such as C, python and php for the web) and some "top down" learning.

Anyway, what do you think?

Thanks
Daniel

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HeX

from the top down
it took me three months, i did a program which could solve systems of linear equations

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megamind5005

I guess from top to bottom is most common one and the one i went for (JavaScript and Python is what i know). Bottom-up takes too long to be useful in the short-term, and if u just wanna get progrmming as soon as possible i guess u'd better learn a high level language. And eventually, most people i know will starting "going out from the middle" and keep building on knowledge of one langauge, until they decide to learn another. Say, in my case, i'm not gonna start learning C++ or Java or anything until i'm pretty confident with my Python skills.

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Tetris is so unrealistic

Infinite Recursion

Started: Bottom Up
Favorite: Middle Out

Less than an hour.

C++, C#, Python, PHP are good languages to have at hand.

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http://jasonpowers.net

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root."

Libervisco

Well, it turned out I just scratched a bit from the bottom and the moved up and went from top to bottom now. I haven't finished reading that assembly book. I've read the first few chapters until it started going deeper into "complex programming" which is now probably much uglier assembly

Anyway, I started reading the "Learning to program" book, which introduces a beginner to programming step by step explaining and presenting examples in three similar programming languages step by step, Python, JavaScript and VBScript. Actually, those would be more scripting languages. Anyway, I'm not too interested at JavaScript (and not at all interested in VBScript) at this point so I'm mostly focusing on Python part.

So far I'm doing well. Thanks to this book I actually learned enough basics to be able to create the simplest programs on my own (and I mean really *simplest*) . I took one example program early in the book (times table) and upgraded it to something a bit better, a good learning experience. I hit a wall with it though, I might post a problem in another thread.

Anyway, it is indeed true that one is much faster to actually be able to do something useful when going from top to bottom and thus fully matching your current experience level, than when going from bottom to top. I might come back to assembly some time in the future, but now I imagine I'll first get to learn python well, then C and PHP and then lisp and scheme

Thanks
Daniel

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Libervis.com - Nexus of the free world online_