Tuesday, December 7

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Peter Norvig is one of the authors of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, a popular AI book in Computer Science. In Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years, he told us how to study programming:

  1. Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. This is the most important thing in programming. You learn programming because it's fun and you love it.
  2. Talk to other programmers; read other programs. Learn from others.
  3. Program. Learn from practice.
  4. If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate school). Norvig said a deploma or a degree would help you to gain more experience. I say the 4 years study can help you to understand 7, 8.
  5. Work on projects with other programmers. Learn from others.
  6. Work on projects after other programmers. Learn and create from others.
  7. Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Understand language.
  8. Remember that there is a "computer" in "computer science". Understand computer.
  9. Get involved in a language standardization effort. Understand the creation of language.
  10. Have the good sense to get off the language standardization effort as quickly as possible. But you don't have to follow all the standards.

Those are good advice, and I've practise most of them :) and I've been programming more than 10 years. So, it's time for me to become a good programmer now. But first of all, let me finish reading the Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. I borrowed it in September, but I havn't finished reading Chapter 1. :(


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