learning programming with books

Question

What is the best way to learn a new programming subject ?
A lot of friends said "read books" but i find books boring and take a lot of time and video tutorials more effective .
But more often these video tutorials don't cover everything i need .
So , what's the best way to dive into something new and not be bored of the materials.

Answer 1

You may go somewhere in the middle and concentrate on e-books. They often come with sample codes attached, which you can execute while learning about a particular feature first.
One of good sources is packtpub, which offers one e-book per day completely free to download. Most of them are accompanied by relevant code samples:

https://www.sololearn.com/discuss/444755/?ref=app
https://www.sololearn.com/discuss/447092/?ref=app
https://www.sololearn.com/discuss/649549/?ref=app
https://www.sololearn.com/discuss/476426/?ref=app
https://www.sololearn.com/discuss/517058/?ref=app
https://www.sololearn.com/discuss/478620/?ref=app

Answer 2

The reality of this world is that sometimes things are just boring, but it's things that you have to do. I'm with you 100% on reading, and it's a challenge I've had my entire life, but it's something that you have to learn to control and just do it.

This is how I learned to get past that. My goal is to read only ONE chapter EVERY DAY on the language i'm trying to learn. That's easily accomplished and can be accomplished before you get bored. If you do that, you'll inevitably finish the book and learn what you needed from it. However, most often you'll find that you end up getting engaged into what you're learning and then end up reading more than just one chapter. It's a good system that doesn't put too much stress on me because my goal is just one chapter, so when I do more than one, I feel even more accomplished and motivated from it.

Personally, I enjoy learning multiple things at the same time, rather than focusing on finishing one before moving on to another. I do that because it saves me time on learning multiple things, I grew up in a school system where we had 8+ classes every day (each class a diff subject), and because my attention span sucks so it takes advantage of my natural behavior to jump around between things. As well, when I learn multiple things, it resolves the issue of getting bored or burnt out on something because you spread it out before you can get bored/burnt out. However, everyone learns differently, so you have to assess what works best FOR YOU. Some people get easily overwhelmed/frustrated when dealing with many things at once, so if that's you, don't take the same path that I did because I did what works best for myself.

Also, you'll want to read through the language. Practice what you learned/remember. Read through it again, but this time write down any concept you don't fully understand yet. When you're done reading through again, go and research everything on your list extensively. Repeat this process until you understand the language.

Best of luck to ya!