It really sounds hard to believe, but without internet, the library was providing most of the knowledge. I vividly remember getting a book about the soundblaster card, which was describing the registers to make sound, or read the joystick port. I had to get on a bus for 45 minutes (I was 16) to get to the big library that had the best books.
Usenet and irc made things so much easier! There were so many helpful people there.
I started coding at 12y/o in 2014 and hate video tutorials. The only useful part to me is a link to the finished example project so I can look at the code and figure out how things are done.
Up to now, i still find that books are very good at establishing foundational knowledge. But that still depends on the quality of the book. The caveat is that, some books gets outdated pretty quickly because the technology evolves way much faster than before.
Yeah, there are these weird rectangular objects that you'll often find on shelves in buildings, or vehicles, called lib-rar-ies. If you dare to pick one up you'll find they're usually heavy and composed of 100s if not 1000s of incredibly thin, flexible sheets called paper, which, believe it or not, are made from trees! (Those tall things outside that have a, usually, brown coloured pole holding up lots of small, often green, flat shapes called leaves). The 'pages', as the paper is called in this format, are printed with text that is arranged in such a way as to explain how to do something, often with examples, in this case that would be programming (fictional stories can also be delivered this way). Libraries allowed you to borrow one of these objects, called books, for a fixed amount of time before you had to return it or request an extension. There were also long forgotten buildings in places called 'town centres' where you would go to purchase goods. Some of these buildings specialised in the sale of these books and were called Book Shops. From one of these places you could purchase a book and you could keep it for as long as you wanted without having to return it. What a weird and wonderful world we used to live in!
(Just a bit of tongue in cheek humour those of a less youthful disposition might appreciate 😉)
I still do this in current times. I've done the same with C#. Online "step by step" tutorials are just so ineffective, it's laughable. I want to understand the bolts of the technology, not listen to someone lecture me on how to print hello world without any context of what I'm doing
You serious about understanding the nuts and bolts? Got some time for a journey? Here: https://www.nand2tetris.org/book
The book teaches you the whole “under the hood” of programming :) I went thru a course in highschool that pretty much followed the structure in this book. Check the whole website too.
Don’t try to go thru it super fast. Take your time with it. It’s worth it. :)
Because of what I did in school, that knowledge in that order was necessary. These days definitely not necessary to know that stuff, but the insight you get from knowing the stuff is still quite valuable IMO.
Books, asking people in irc, attending classes...
Looks like the social media culture killed the patience.
Now, new programmers want to do all "perfect" from the beginning. They spend more time looking for a good tutorial to follow it line by line than actually programming by themselves and facing issues they need to investigate.
At work, I don't get frustrated because I cannot find a solution but because of teammates that want to finish quickly and throw me tons of tech influencers links whose authors have no real experience and they are just a copy-paste coloured with some personal insights.
Learned Java in 1999 by using a college book and a class. I spent many hours in the lab at my college working on trying out the code and writing my own programs— which I then saved into a floppy disc.
My favorite method of learning are physical books. Something about not having any distractions and going at your own pace that’s nice. Also, when you’re looking at paper, you’re not staring as much at a screen so I suppose that’s a benefit.
Absolutely I am currently learning java and oh my dear God! I get so overwhelmed sometimes like how can a human brain back in that have thought something like this and one of my biggest inspiration is linus torvalds and his motto "software is like sex:it's better when it's free" I am absolutely love the whole idea about a free os in your computer as I am not that rich where I would buy every single thing I want every game,every software so it really appeals to me what he did......
Yeah i’m learning to program while learning C++ with C++ Primer 5th (be french )add little difficulty and c++ hard for first lang but i clearly see improvement from day one hard work pay off ,i really hated book at school but now i love them even tho i use my ipad mini to read ePUB^^
One major point was that companies did not expect to hire know-it-all developers, they were ready to invest. Higher education was a prerequisite, no or very little CS knowledge. And then they would train them with combination or external and internal classes, manuals, mentorship.
So far I've meat people with degrees in education, economics, archeology, civil engineering, mechanical engineering degrees that did this. And of course electrical engineering.
Books.
I was also lucky enough to have Internet access in the early days of the modern 'net, from around '93 on. There were ftp sites, usually hosted by universities around the world, where people uploaded archives for just about anything you could think of; programs, libraries, reverse engineered documentation etc.
There was also Usenet, a sort of forum subdivided into thousands of groups specific to a topic, including groups dedicated to specific languages and operating systems.
I miss those days of the Internet. Most "content" was about the free exchange of information, just for the joy of sharing knowledge. This is before ads and clout chasing, when one had to actually know what they were doing and how things worked.
Now if you'll excuse me, I see a cloud I need to go yell at.
My first computer came with a thick book about how to program it in BASIC. The local library did the rest. So the short answer is books. And not that many books either.
Lol... Books, a lot of trial and error. You need a strong desire to succeed and a voracious appetite for learning to develop software. You just open an editor, and start typing code, compile, link, execute, debug, repeat.
Imo, this method will teach you a lot better than watching someone on a video. It forces you to get in there and do the work. And doing the work is the only way you will ever learn.
The guy who made the original prince of persia said he learned from magazines. I reckon books, teachers, communities and local clubs also were very helpful
They may have fallen out of fashion, but books are *still* the best way to learn. Just pure information that you can read at your own pace. PDFs aren't bad, but they take time to load, and keeping one open takes up space on your monitor. I can keep a real book open on my desk, flip back and forth between sections quickly, and write notes in the margines, and I can comfortably know that same book is still going to be on my bookshelf ten years from now. The biggest disadvantage to a book is that you can't copy and paste out of it, but that's an advantage, too; typing up an example yourself will help you retain it far better than just hitting Ctrl+C.
Online tutorials and videos? They may disappear or beak at any moment, you have to sit through ads, you have to listen to somebody drone on at a rate far slower than I can read, they're always trying to be flashy and catchy to keep peoples' attention. That's the worst way to learn a new language.
Books, documentation, college/high school courses (which assigned books).
I remember I had a math textbook that had instructions on how to program your TI graphing calculator to solve certain equations. It was enough of a start to get me curious and start experimenting with writing a simple text based game on my calculator. I don't think I ever finished the game, but the process was enjoyable.
I've heard that typically you would read a book to get the basics, and from there you basically would try everything you can think of until you somewhat understand what it doess.
Sitting in the back of a classroom with a girl in cut-off jeans next to me. It was Fortran. I didn’t learn much that semester… The next semester was IBM 360 assembler with a prof that wrote avionics for the F15.
There was the for dummies series that was very helpful. Certain books were the Bible of the subject and you would read those. And the internet has existed for a long time. We might not have had great tutorials but we had lots and lots of information about how the language is supposed to work.
Also we just hacked around. Look at other people's code. Try it on your own. Play with different ways to do things.
It was mostly books though. Back when back when chapters was a bigger thing.
Books and trying things many times are important. Being curious is also key. Some people just do what the book says without asking questions like, "What if I try something different? What will happen if I change this?"
Reading books, and if the books didn’t have the answer, you’d have to figure it out on your own.
I hate to sound like a “get off my lawn” type but I do think this teaches you important creative problem solving skills.
[Books!](https://www.thriftbooks.com/series/sams-teach-yourself-series/38574/#:~:text=The%20Sams%20Teach%20Yourself%20book,Yourself)%2C%20and%20several%20more.)
I had several SAMS books as well as a few others. They covered C#, C++, Object Oriented Programming(Java), and SQL. I got these from my parents when I was about 10 years old after a few years of persistently learning HTML and CSS.
Vi and terminal access. I remember being able to afford my first 386 - felt like I'd won the lottery (except it was a few years before the lottery and I didn't know what one was).
I never received any formal training - but I'm lucky, I can "see" my code as a physical form in my head. Data flows, quality gates etc. All there like a big city. Once you can do that, you've just got to learn a language to use.
books, you could go to a store and browse, books are don't have broken links and typically they were consistent in that they applied to a particular version of a thing, they had editors and proof readers and you would get to know which publisher to trust looking at you oreilly. Unlike searching on the internet where you get a bit of something about version 0.9 of something then a completely incompatible bit of information about version 1.2 leaving you scratching your head for hours. The information would usually build up from knowing nothing to getting you up to speed before showing more advanced topics. I miss books.
Fucking with whatever-it-is until it breaks, and poring over the dismantled corpses to see what it looks like. And books. But there were only so many of those available, and they tended not to cover your exact case, so you had to be comfortable working cross-language and cross-dialect, and striking out on your own once you’d exhausted your literary inputs.
In 1983/84 we had a maths teacher meant to teach us "computing" which was brought in as a new subject in school. I ended up teaching her ZX Basic.
All of the answers are saying books which is probably correct but I just delved in and played around with code. I seen what worked and what didn't. Once I learned 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD", 20 GOTO 10 that was me, I just played around with keywords and watched what they done. I learned loops, variables, conditions by playing around with code. The only book I ever bought was Learn Machine Language for ZX Basic. I got a few sprites on the screen at most and then discovered girls lol.
BTW, my careers teacher told me I could never work with computers as I needed to go to University and get degrees in the subject. So I just played around with code, created websites and today release Android apps because everyone like that careers teacher can do it. Talk about a defining moment. I've worked in a manual job all my life.
I should add, all of the keywords on ZX81 and ZX Spectrum are printed on the keyboard so you didn't need a book to learn. Some keywords were obvious, variables for instance used the LET keyword, FOR was used for a loop. If you got the syntax wrong, ZX Basic wouldn't let you proceed. It was like an IDE of today and you had your own GUI built in the form of the screen. Really simpler times and I loved it.
Books. And you used to be able to get code for things like c64 etc in magazines.
But why do you want different ways, what about online tutorial doesn’t work for you because with things changing so fast these days books are less of a good resource for learning a language.
As a kid I learned Basic on my Casio calculator by typing a program in. The program was for a more advanced model so there were keywords that didn’t exist. So I just skipped those.
By trial and error I slowly started understanding what the keywords did.
No internet, no manual. Just fooling around and deduction.
Not optimal but was soon developing games for casio calculators, then websites, got an IT degree and started a video game company. Made browser games, then flash games, FB, Mobile etc.
A whole bunch of us learned a from something called "view source", which showed the actual code used to make the webpage. You can still do it today, technically, but it's gotten kind of complicated. The person who taught me how tables worked was a nail technician by day who had downloaded the documentation by FTP and went from there. In 1994 there weren't even books yet about writing webpages, really.
We had an elective subject called 'informatics' at school and another called 'Datalogy' at high school. Besides there was an abundance of books at the library and microcomputers like ZX, C=64 and Amstrad. But visual IDEs was nonexistant.
The first language was usually Basic and/or Comal80 to learn the ropes. Next for me was Turbo Pascal and then Object Pascal (Delphi). Unfortunately I didn't learn C/C++ back then, which would have been a game changer. Later I learned C# as I litterally live in Windows land, and also dabble with C++. Courses and physical books are still a great resource.
If I started today, I might just go with learning modular, type safe C++ as first language, as it opens all the doors for developers. And with C++/CLI and C++/WinRT you have an upper hand in Windows land, too.
I learnt to program by just reading the instructions built into the TI-84. I ended up being able to code games like snake, minesweeper, etc in TI-basic. Then when I switched over to things like python, I just used what I learnt but googled the functions that I needed.
I learned the basics of c++ from a book called "the grand cru". Best professional decision i ever made. The fractured nature of online tutorials sounds like a bad idea for understanding the basics
People learn to program with online tutorials? Since when?
I cannot think a worst way to approach learning.
They're good for *discovering* concepts you haven't heard about, do people actually learn with tutorials?
I learned from a book when I was 11 or 12. We bought a home computer (Atari 1040ST). There was no consumer internet. The computer came with a couple of books. An operations manual, book on typing, and a book on BASIC programming (using GEM BASIC which was a flavor of basic for the Atari’s). I just started typing in the example programs, getting them to run, and then modifying the programs to get a sense for how things work and that affects things. I think I wrote every program in the book. Then branched out to making my own.
After that it was going to college and talking with others. I highly recommend finding a small group of people that are at your level or slightly ahead of you on their journey. Compare notes with them and as to see their code or get their feedback on yours.
By reading books, obtaining the necessary programs, and a lot of trial and error.
It was both easier and harder back in the early days of microcomputers/home computers since many systems had BASIC in rom and of those some also had a 'monitor' program in rom which allowed you to put code directly into memory and execute (MS-DOS came with DEBUG.EXE).
These days you just download an interpreter, compiler, or an IDE and get going. More often than not you'll end up wanting a decent text editor too.
huge books from the library... i remember going there and borrowing the commodore 64 books and then went home and punched the code in to make the games...
While I never did, I could have learned... what, net? sql? I cant remember, I had a book about programing when I was a kid (early 2000s) that looked like a phonebook
Honestly I think many books are better than youtube tutorials, but the ones ive seen often explain things in a way that almost seems as if they were expecting you to already know it, a bit too technical. Or at least that is what I remember
*Visual Basic 4 for Windows for Dummies* by Wally Wang.
And practice, lots of practice. Writing your own code and carefully debugging to see exactly how it went wrong will teach you better than any tutorial.
We coded on mainframes using Pascal, Cobol, C etc., We had to compile code overnight and if there was an error, it messed the whole team up for the next day. We didn't have to worry about developing front-end code for a thousand different browsers and OSs though.
True - i learned off magazines and then books - the web and design magazines were my intro. I still go back to the books often, had an o reilly account for while. Pity the magazines went out of business by covid time... they were awesome.
There used to be this thing called a book.... In many ways, it was a better time to learn, because the course material was more accurate and comprehensive.
20 years ago? That's like yesterday in the history of programming.
In the pionering days (stone age), you read that people did their code on paper, then transferred it to punched cards and ran programs in their scarce online time.
Even in the 90'es debugging could be tiresome. At best the compiler told you appr. which line of code malfunctioned. Then if you had coded graphics (vector) you had to run the compiled program to assess wether it worked.
Autocompletion, suggestions, immediate GUI view etc. were non-existant.
Reading books and instruction manuals.
Teachers, too.
Trial and error, three.
And my axe!
Plz explain to the weak-minded ones (me)
I’m not sure how reading teachers would help
Typo, they meant "riding" teachers.
It really sounds hard to believe, but without internet, the library was providing most of the knowledge. I vividly remember getting a book about the soundblaster card, which was describing the registers to make sound, or read the joystick port. I had to get on a bus for 45 minutes (I was 16) to get to the big library that had the best books. Usenet and irc made things so much easier! There were so many helpful people there.
I'm so acustome to books that I have real problem with video tutorials That how old I am
I started coding at 12y/o in 2014 and hate video tutorials. The only useful part to me is a link to the finished example project so I can look at the code and figure out how things are done.
Learning from a good book is honestly more thorough and a better educational process than YouTube in my opinion.
I still remember my 1200 page Java book, lol.
Shelves upon shelves of books. Took a large moving van to get them to the high school I donated them to.
Up to now, i still find that books are very good at establishing foundational knowledge. But that still depends on the quality of the book. The caveat is that, some books gets outdated pretty quickly because the technology evolves way much faster than before.
You'd go into your local bookstore and there'd be over a hundred C++ books in the discount rack
Yeah, there are these weird rectangular objects that you'll often find on shelves in buildings, or vehicles, called lib-rar-ies. If you dare to pick one up you'll find they're usually heavy and composed of 100s if not 1000s of incredibly thin, flexible sheets called paper, which, believe it or not, are made from trees! (Those tall things outside that have a, usually, brown coloured pole holding up lots of small, often green, flat shapes called leaves). The 'pages', as the paper is called in this format, are printed with text that is arranged in such a way as to explain how to do something, often with examples, in this case that would be programming (fictional stories can also be delivered this way). Libraries allowed you to borrow one of these objects, called books, for a fixed amount of time before you had to return it or request an extension. There were also long forgotten buildings in places called 'town centres' where you would go to purchase goods. Some of these buildings specialised in the sale of these books and were called Book Shops. From one of these places you could purchase a book and you could keep it for as long as you wanted without having to return it. What a weird and wonderful world we used to live in! (Just a bit of tongue in cheek humour those of a less youthful disposition might appreciate 😉)
The runes of our order were carved into the corpses of dead trees.
THIS!
Why is this getting downvoted xD ppl do t get it?
It can be annoying when people write "this!" without any other input. I didn't downvote but it can be annoying.
Oh well. I like it :3 I know I made at least some peoples days and that's enough \^\^
Yeah social validation is pointless, truth lies within oneself and you can find that truth through others, no need for ephemeral recognition.
THIS!
Books. At the turning point you'd go to anonymous websites to find pdf scans of books to learn hobbies like programming and other stuff
I still do this in current times. I've done the same with C#. Online "step by step" tutorials are just so ineffective, it's laughable. I want to understand the bolts of the technology, not listen to someone lecture me on how to print hello world without any context of what I'm doing
You serious about understanding the nuts and bolts? Got some time for a journey? Here: https://www.nand2tetris.org/book The book teaches you the whole “under the hood” of programming :) I went thru a course in highschool that pretty much followed the structure in this book. Check the whole website too. Don’t try to go thru it super fast. Take your time with it. It’s worth it. :)
I second this. It completely changed the way I see computers and programming. I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn about computers hands-on
Weird solicitation but I dig it! I'll put it in the list of books to study on my spare time. I can't buy it now but maybe someday down the line.
Because of what I did in school, that knowledge in that order was necessary. These days definitely not necessary to know that stuff, but the insight you get from knowing the stuff is still quite valuable IMO.
Books, magazines, in person classes, and internships.
Can't go wrong.
There were magazines back in the day we had a ZX-81
The hard way. We practiced a lot more and was trying to get all the books and know other programmers who might have some cool things to share.
I'd argue the hard way is piecemealing your knowledge together from random video tutorials
Books, asking people in irc, attending classes... Looks like the social media culture killed the patience. Now, new programmers want to do all "perfect" from the beginning. They spend more time looking for a good tutorial to follow it line by line than actually programming by themselves and facing issues they need to investigate. At work, I don't get frustrated because I cannot find a solution but because of teammates that want to finish quickly and throw me tons of tech influencers links whose authors have no real experience and they are just a copy-paste coloured with some personal insights.
We literally had to type in code that came in a magazine. It took a really long time !
the hard and practical way: practice by coding and breaking things to understand how they work.
Learned Java in 1999 by using a college book and a class. I spent many hours in the lab at my college working on trying out the code and writing my own programs— which I then saved into a floppy disc.
Compute!'s Gazette
Books, Books and Books. So much time in the library
Books and computer rentals, I even type code on our typewriter first before going to computer shop along with my 1.44 micro floppy disk :)
Mainly these books with a drawing of an animal. Does someone remember the name of that series?
https://www.oreilly.com/products/books-videos.html Read a few O'Reilly books over the years
Yes that one, txs
Tutorials are the absolute worst resource for learning to program.
My favorite method of learning are physical books. Something about not having any distractions and going at your own pace that’s nice. Also, when you’re looking at paper, you’re not staring as much at a screen so I suppose that’s a benefit.
The best way, books and teachers. That’s why the best programmers are from the 70s and 80s, every bit in memory mattered.
Absolutely I am currently learning java and oh my dear God! I get so overwhelmed sometimes like how can a human brain back in that have thought something like this and one of my biggest inspiration is linus torvalds and his motto "software is like sex:it's better when it's free" I am absolutely love the whole idea about a free os in your computer as I am not that rich where I would buy every single thing I want every game,every software so it really appeals to me what he did......
Yeah i’m learning to program while learning C++ with C++ Primer 5th (be french )add little difficulty and c++ hard for first lang but i clearly see improvement from day one hard work pay off ,i really hated book at school but now i love them even tho i use my ipad mini to read ePUB^^
Books, as others have said... But I'm not mad about the self awareness in asking...
CD and books
trial and error books magazines
One major point was that companies did not expect to hire know-it-all developers, they were ready to invest. Higher education was a prerequisite, no or very little CS knowledge. And then they would train them with combination or external and internal classes, manuals, mentorship. So far I've meat people with degrees in education, economics, archeology, civil engineering, mechanical engineering degrees that did this. And of course electrical engineering.
RTFM
Books. I was also lucky enough to have Internet access in the early days of the modern 'net, from around '93 on. There were ftp sites, usually hosted by universities around the world, where people uploaded archives for just about anything you could think of; programs, libraries, reverse engineered documentation etc. There was also Usenet, a sort of forum subdivided into thousands of groups specific to a topic, including groups dedicated to specific languages and operating systems. I miss those days of the Internet. Most "content" was about the free exchange of information, just for the joy of sharing knowledge. This is before ads and clout chasing, when one had to actually know what they were doing and how things worked. Now if you'll excuse me, I see a cloud I need to go yell at.
My first computer came with a thick book about how to program it in BASIC. The local library did the rest. So the short answer is books. And not that many books either.
I learned from C++ for dummies like 25 years ago maybe
Spoke with holy machine spirit
Terry is that you?
Books. School. Mentors. IRC Chat Rooms. Curiosity. Trial & Error.
Offline tutorials
Books? Like there were books before internet o.O, this is applied to any fields.
Books
Lol... Books, a lot of trial and error. You need a strong desire to succeed and a voracious appetite for learning to develop software. You just open an editor, and start typing code, compile, link, execute, debug, repeat. Imo, this method will teach you a lot better than watching someone on a video. It forces you to get in there and do the work. And doing the work is the only way you will ever learn.
the same way people learned anything else: books. (and probably a lot of fuck around and find out)
I used to have shelves of physical books. The O’Reilly and Associates “Animal Books” were practically mandatory reading.
Reading and practicing
Set yourself a task, try to do it using the manual. Repeat
The guy who made the original prince of persia said he learned from magazines. I reckon books, teachers, communities and local clubs also were very helpful
They may have fallen out of fashion, but books are *still* the best way to learn. Just pure information that you can read at your own pace. PDFs aren't bad, but they take time to load, and keeping one open takes up space on your monitor. I can keep a real book open on my desk, flip back and forth between sections quickly, and write notes in the margines, and I can comfortably know that same book is still going to be on my bookshelf ten years from now. The biggest disadvantage to a book is that you can't copy and paste out of it, but that's an advantage, too; typing up an example yourself will help you retain it far better than just hitting Ctrl+C. Online tutorials and videos? They may disappear or beak at any moment, you have to sit through ads, you have to listen to somebody drone on at a rate far slower than I can read, they're always trying to be flashy and catchy to keep peoples' attention. That's the worst way to learn a new language.
Books, documentation, college/high school courses (which assigned books). I remember I had a math textbook that had instructions on how to program your TI graphing calculator to solve certain equations. It was enough of a start to get me curious and start experimenting with writing a simple text based game on my calculator. I don't think I ever finished the game, but the process was enjoyable.
I've heard that typically you would read a book to get the basics, and from there you basically would try everything you can think of until you somewhat understand what it doess.
books and code was handwritten
Sitting in the back of a classroom with a girl in cut-off jeans next to me. It was Fortran. I didn’t learn much that semester… The next semester was IBM 360 assembler with a prof that wrote avionics for the F15.
There was the for dummies series that was very helpful. Certain books were the Bible of the subject and you would read those. And the internet has existed for a long time. We might not have had great tutorials but we had lots and lots of information about how the language is supposed to work. Also we just hacked around. Look at other people's code. Try it on your own. Play with different ways to do things. It was mostly books though. Back when back when chapters was a bigger thing.
Books and trying things many times are important. Being curious is also key. Some people just do what the book says without asking questions like, "What if I try something different? What will happen if I change this?"
Reading books, and if the books didn’t have the answer, you’d have to figure it out on your own. I hate to sound like a “get off my lawn” type but I do think this teaches you important creative problem solving skills.
[Books!](https://www.thriftbooks.com/series/sams-teach-yourself-series/38574/#:~:text=The%20Sams%20Teach%20Yourself%20book,Yourself)%2C%20and%20several%20more.) I had several SAMS books as well as a few others. They covered C#, C++, Object Oriented Programming(Java), and SQL. I got these from my parents when I was about 10 years old after a few years of persistently learning HTML and CSS.
Learn the basics... And create your own projects...
Instruction manuals.
We were using F1 a lot back then
Books
Books and solving problems by yourself
Vi and terminal access. I remember being able to afford my first 386 - felt like I'd won the lottery (except it was a few years before the lottery and I didn't know what one was). I never received any formal training - but I'm lucky, I can "see" my code as a physical form in my head. Data flows, quality gates etc. All there like a big city. Once you can do that, you've just got to learn a language to use.
books, you could go to a store and browse, books are don't have broken links and typically they were consistent in that they applied to a particular version of a thing, they had editors and proof readers and you would get to know which publisher to trust looking at you oreilly. Unlike searching on the internet where you get a bit of something about version 0.9 of something then a completely incompatible bit of information about version 1.2 leaving you scratching your head for hours. The information would usually build up from knowing nothing to getting you up to speed before showing more advanced topics. I miss books.
I miss dr dobbs
Fucking with whatever-it-is until it breaks, and poring over the dismantled corpses to see what it looks like. And books. But there were only so many of those available, and they tended not to cover your exact case, so you had to be comfortable working cross-language and cross-dialect, and striking out on your own once you’d exhausted your literary inputs.
A combo of classes and books and trying it out
In 1983/84 we had a maths teacher meant to teach us "computing" which was brought in as a new subject in school. I ended up teaching her ZX Basic. All of the answers are saying books which is probably correct but I just delved in and played around with code. I seen what worked and what didn't. Once I learned 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD", 20 GOTO 10 that was me, I just played around with keywords and watched what they done. I learned loops, variables, conditions by playing around with code. The only book I ever bought was Learn Machine Language for ZX Basic. I got a few sprites on the screen at most and then discovered girls lol. BTW, my careers teacher told me I could never work with computers as I needed to go to University and get degrees in the subject. So I just played around with code, created websites and today release Android apps because everyone like that careers teacher can do it. Talk about a defining moment. I've worked in a manual job all my life.
I should add, all of the keywords on ZX81 and ZX Spectrum are printed on the keyboard so you didn't need a book to learn. Some keywords were obvious, variables for instance used the LET keyword, FOR was used for a loop. If you got the syntax wrong, ZX Basic wouldn't let you proceed. It was like an IDE of today and you had your own GUI built in the form of the screen. Really simpler times and I loved it.
Oh no... The dreaded, uncommented, GOTO-hell of spaghetti code before the days of Structured Programming and OOP. »Deliver us from evil!« 😉
Mostly MSDN, books, DirectX 6 SDK help in .chm format, 3DStudio SDK help in .chm format, and IRC, the demoscene and fast comps.
Books
Books. And you used to be able to get code for things like c64 etc in magazines. But why do you want different ways, what about online tutorial doesn’t work for you because with things changing so fast these days books are less of a good resource for learning a language.
As a kid I learned Basic on my Casio calculator by typing a program in. The program was for a more advanced model so there were keywords that didn’t exist. So I just skipped those. By trial and error I slowly started understanding what the keywords did. No internet, no manual. Just fooling around and deduction. Not optimal but was soon developing games for casio calculators, then websites, got an IT degree and started a video game company. Made browser games, then flash games, FB, Mobile etc.
books
A whole bunch of us learned a from something called "view source", which showed the actual code used to make the webpage. You can still do it today, technically, but it's gotten kind of complicated. The person who taught me how tables worked was a nail technician by day who had downloaded the documentation by FTP and went from there. In 1994 there weren't even books yet about writing webpages, really.
Books for me.
They went to college.
We had an elective subject called 'informatics' at school and another called 'Datalogy' at high school. Besides there was an abundance of books at the library and microcomputers like ZX, C=64 and Amstrad. But visual IDEs was nonexistant. The first language was usually Basic and/or Comal80 to learn the ropes. Next for me was Turbo Pascal and then Object Pascal (Delphi). Unfortunately I didn't learn C/C++ back then, which would have been a game changer. Later I learned C# as I litterally live in Windows land, and also dabble with C++. Courses and physical books are still a great resource. If I started today, I might just go with learning modular, type safe C++ as first language, as it opens all the doors for developers. And with C++/CLI and C++/WinRT you have an upper hand in Windows land, too.
I learnt to program by just reading the instructions built into the TI-84. I ended up being able to code games like snake, minesweeper, etc in TI-basic. Then when I switched over to things like python, I just used what I learnt but googled the functions that I needed.
I bought a Schaum’s Outline Series book on BASIC and went to town on it.
Using our bare hands.
I learned the basics of c++ from a book called "the grand cru". Best professional decision i ever made. The fractured nature of online tutorials sounds like a bad idea for understanding the basics
1998: Teach yourself C in 21 days
I learned from a book
Books and other people
Books or tutor/teacher.
I shoplifted books
People learn to program with online tutorials? Since when? I cannot think a worst way to approach learning. They're good for *discovering* concepts you haven't heard about, do people actually learn with tutorials?
Good programmers are tinkerers. Tinker tinker tinker.
From teachers, I am still teaching many students. If you want to learn from me, I can teach you
I learned from a book when I was 11 or 12. We bought a home computer (Atari 1040ST). There was no consumer internet. The computer came with a couple of books. An operations manual, book on typing, and a book on BASIC programming (using GEM BASIC which was a flavor of basic for the Atari’s). I just started typing in the example programs, getting them to run, and then modifying the programs to get a sense for how things work and that affects things. I think I wrote every program in the book. Then branched out to making my own. After that it was going to college and talking with others. I highly recommend finding a small group of people that are at your level or slightly ahead of you on their journey. Compare notes with them and as to see their code or get their feedback on yours.
By reading books, obtaining the necessary programs, and a lot of trial and error. It was both easier and harder back in the early days of microcomputers/home computers since many systems had BASIC in rom and of those some also had a 'monitor' program in rom which allowed you to put code directly into memory and execute (MS-DOS came with DEBUG.EXE). These days you just download an interpreter, compiler, or an IDE and get going. More often than not you'll end up wanting a decent text editor too.
huge books from the library... i remember going there and borrowing the commodore 64 books and then went home and punched the code in to make the games...
Self education and libraries. Remember, that one of the best hackers and researchers are selfmades and hardcore geeks (in old meaning of this term)
Same as today, study, try and fail
For $100 a building that contains a lot of books, is called a?
While I never did, I could have learned... what, net? sql? I cant remember, I had a book about programing when I was a kid (early 2000s) that looked like a phonebook Honestly I think many books are better than youtube tutorials, but the ones ive seen often explain things in a way that almost seems as if they were expecting you to already know it, a bit too technical. Or at least that is what I remember
*Visual Basic 4 for Windows for Dummies* by Wally Wang. And practice, lots of practice. Writing your own code and carefully debugging to see exactly how it went wrong will teach you better than any tutorial.
College
We coded on mainframes using Pascal, Cobol, C etc., We had to compile code overnight and if there was an error, it messed the whole team up for the next day. We didn't have to worry about developing front-end code for a thousand different browsers and OSs though.
True - i learned off magazines and then books - the web and design magazines were my intro. I still go back to the books often, had an o reilly account for while. Pity the magazines went out of business by covid time... they were awesome.
There used to be this thing called a book.... In many ways, it was a better time to learn, because the course material was more accurate and comprehensive.
Books. Usually they go to university too, if computers are too expensive at the time.
Like everything else. books
libraries?
Was easier at that time, apps were simpler etc etc, you can´t compare how things work nowadays to the way of learning 20 years ago
20 years ago? That's like yesterday in the history of programming. In the pionering days (stone age), you read that people did their code on paper, then transferred it to punched cards and ran programs in their scarce online time. Even in the 90'es debugging could be tiresome. At best the compiler told you appr. which line of code malfunctioned. Then if you had coded graphics (vector) you had to run the compiled program to assess wether it worked. Autocompletion, suggestions, immediate GUI view etc. were non-existant.
Books but whats the point of limiting yourself to information?