Tutorial resource?

[xela]

What websites do you guys use/have used to learn new techniques? I'm finding more and more often that video tutorials do much more for me.


Here is a fantastic resource I found for those of you interested in digital painting: www.ctrlpaint.com/home/category/the-basics

[PoundFFFFFF]

I go on behance every day. Constantly getting mindblown serves as great passion fuel.

[xela]

Ever heard of 2advanced? Their site skins absolutely astound me with every version. It's interesting to see the talent progress by going back and looking through their first templates.

[Overflight]

Right now there's a growing number of interesting interactive web courses where you can learn programming and web design. They're rather limited for the time being but hopefully they will grow. The ones I know are:


www.codeschool.com - This one focuses on web design and is paid access (either paying for a single course or paying a monthly fee for ALL courses) but is the best website of its kind, IMHO. The courses also apparently assume you have SOME experience in web design but I managed to complete them with some basic knowledge of HTML and CSS. They also give awesome prizes for completing the courses.


www.codecademy.com - Free but is still in its infancy (though they keep adding new courses). Courses focused on Javascript.


www.rubymonk.com - Also free and updated regularly. Focused on Ruby.

[xela]

I've noticed that to learn programming, your best bet is to basically get as much experience under your belt as possible. In other words, start building basic websites and when you come across something you have no idea how to do, look it up (i.e. "hyperlink hover colors CSS" or "creating a variable Javascript" and have at.

I've tried places like w3schools, and their resources are great for starting out, but it's really hard to learn any scripting language without knowing what specifically you can use things for.

[Kanped]

If you want to learn a programming language, build a calculator with it.  Seriously, this has worked for me every time, it's much easier to go from there.

[Overflight]

Seconding both previous posts. One of the things I lament about my uni programming project was how utterly USELESS it was: we had to program an "email client" in C. Of course, since we learned nothing about network programming said "client" only allowed you to "email" YOURSELF. Stupid as all get out. The class in the following year got to do something I thing I would have enjoyed MUCH more even though it was potentially a MUCH bigger pain in the ass: TETRIS. In the COMMAND LINE.

[Kanped]

I gotta say, after learning Java last year and C# this year, I hate C++ with a passion and C is annoying but very useful (which in itself is annoying).

[AceGambit]

I gotta say, after learning Java last year and C# this year, I hate C++ with a passion and C is annoying but very useful (which in itself is annoying).

Oh we should be best friends!  I feel exactly the same way.  I love my high level languages.  C++ makes me cry.  I do C# and VB.NET.

[Overflight]

Here's YET ANOTHER interactive programming course focused on Ruby. This one claims to help you create an actual full fledged app but every time I try, it returns an error, apparently on Heroku's part. Hopefully they will get the kinks out.

http://www.trybloc.com/


Props for one of their examples being the "FizzBuzz" program. For those who don't understand the significance of this, it has to do with this infamous (and somewhat frightening) blog post:


http://imranontech.com/2007/01/24/using-fizzbuzz-to-find-developers-who-grok-coding/


...I mean geez. My degree only had two or three courses focused specifically on programming and even I know how to do THIS.