Methods of learning / teaching programming

Posted by Mark Avenius on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Mark Avenius
Published on 2011-02-03T21:03:41Z Indexed on 2011/02/03 23:34 UTC
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When I was in school, I had a difficult time getting into programming because of a catch-22 in the learning process:

  1. I didn't know how to write anything because I didn't know what keywords and commands meant. For example (as a student, I would think), "what does this using namespace std; thing do anyway?
  2. I didn't know what keywords and commands meant because I hadn't written anything.

This basically led me to spending countless long night cursing the compiler as I made minor tweaks to my assignments until they would compile (and hopefully perform whatever operation they were supposed to).

Is there a teaching/learning method that anyone uses that gets around this catch-22?

I am trying to make this non-argumentative, which is why I don't want to know the 'best' method, but rather which methods exist.

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