A few days ago I came over this question:
Did you ever switch from one programming language to another?
and it seems, that almost everyone had this problem more than just once.
What is your starting point for learning a new,
similar (i.e. C to C++) or
completely different (i.e. Perl to JAVA)
new programming language?
Do you use webcasts, ebooks, printed books, online tutorials, courses,...
I start writing code. Solve some Project Euler problems, write whatever random tools I need at the moment, implement common patterns I use all the time, etc. To learn things as I go, I use whatever documentation is online.
I generally look for Web casts or e-learning sites such as VTC. This has helped me a lot! When i went from Java to C# and ASP.NET i used asp.net/learn and VTC for this. I find Video Tutorials and others discussing the programming language I want to learn, be a good way of getting good information!
First I read basical sources, to see "how it looks". If it looks "as C", I skip the firsts tutorials I find using google. Sometime I spend time at the bibliotheque, so I have a look on the "standards" for the language.
For instance, for perl, I learned the data structures, then I wrote some small programs. And after that, I began with language specificities, one liner and so on.
If I really don't know the language (like Caml for me), I read basicals tutorials for beginners (data structure, function declaration, conditionnals) and then I make some stupids programs, after what I look code.
I don't like webcast, because the sourcecode isn't readable (imo).
So : online tutorials, printed books, ebooks, and school for me.
Examples from others
The man Unix command, especially useful for perl or tcl/tk
books or ebooks
writing code
Web Dev as a career is about learning new languages every year.
Almost invariably online tutorials (not references at first) on one monitor with an IDE and a blank new project (or equivalent) on the other monitor. It's really, critically, amazingly important to actually be coding as you're reading imho.
If it looks familiar enough I just focus on the obvious differences and work out the subtleties as I go. If it's completely different in syntax or concept I'll work things out starting at helloworld.
If it is totally new, then I prefer to get some book for beginners/dummys. Even if the language is the same, but different environment - like switching from Windows to Symbian. It's still C++ and all the for(), if/else applies, but otherwise it's totaly alien. Reading such beginners book gives unhurried view of the new settings.
After that I prefer to start with some real-life project. That's the best way to learn the really important things. "Hello world " samples are not worth the trouble.
Find out what is the most recommended book on that language, skim read it, write some code, read a bit more, write some code etc.
The only way to learn a language is to use it. Be prepared to throw your code away and also be prepared to go back and rewrite.
Find a mentor as well
Once you can program in a couple of the language classes (procedural, object oriented, functional, logic) then picking up new languages is usually done on demand and learning the basic syntax and concepts usually doesn't take long. Your typical CS degree programme will include a language in each of those classes at least so even if you haven't touched functional programming for ten years the memories will come flooding back quickly enough.
With modern languages the important thing is to learn the core API, which is vast these days. It's well worth reading over and taking notes on the main API classes/methods/functions. Also worth finding articles or books regarding pitfalls in that language, as well as best practice.
If you learn a new major API each year, even within a single language, I think you are keeping up with the suggestion that programmers should learn a new language every year, at least in spirit. And never at the risk of being a master of nothing :)
I was introduced to programming through a dialup program called “Telix.” Telix, had a scripting language called “SALT.”
Later when the web became popular, I wanted to put a web site. So I learned HTML. From there it grew. The next was how do I connect a database to my web page – I learned PHP and MySql.
The applications started to get bigger, almost out growing PHP. I had an opportunity to learn VB.NET. Shortly after learning VB.NET I switched to C#, which I’ve been working with ever since.
All of my learning was self motivated. When I first started, the internet wasn’t this large orgy of knowledge, googling it wasn’t an option. Everything had to be figured out. Luckily when I started learning HTML, CSS, PHP and Mysql there was already a good size of web sites on the net that had posted articles. There was one forum site that was instrumental in my learning: http://sitepoint.com by far one of the best resources for web development.
When I started windows development I moved away from Sitepoint. The first book I started with was SAMs ASP.NET unleashed. It’s a great place to start, if you into web development on windows.
Happy Coding!
First things first. Determine if the PL is totally new(compared to what you already know ofcourse) and with what motive was it created. How to do that? Read the motivation/intro/preface pages in the ebooks you are going to download from the internet. You can also get this introductory info from podcasts or articles. This info will give you an overall picture of the PL and what problems it was designed to solve, how it differs from other existing PLs and which other PLs it is similar to. This info is always there and you can always find it. After that, you would be aware of the new concepts that are available in the PL that you need to familiarise yourself with. Learn these new concepts and then solve simple problems using the language like creating an employee info system that saves, updates and deletes employee records in a DB. Write programs and only refer to the books when there is a need. Say when you are stuck with the syntax for doing something. This is most helpful for a similar language but for a totally different language, you might need to read about the syntax first and understand its patterns and flow before you start to practice with it solving problems.
Define new increasingly challenging problems that require more advanced ways of solving them and then refere to the books on how you can solve them. Write the code. Do this till you are fed up with the language!
Remember to understand the WHY first of the PL before you do anything to do with the PL. This will guide you to learning fast and getting deeper understanding.
I try to write a non-trivial app that forces me to dig deep into the documentation.
Like a famous shoe company:
Just Do It
Dive right into it, with any references you need, and code something!
I look for tutorials. I'm all but completely stopped buying books because most of the information you need can be easily found on the internet for free.
So to learn a new language (or framework or technology) I usually just go search Google and start reading tutorials and blog posts about it. Usually you can find a good "quick start" or some tutorial that will tell you how to setup your environment and get going. After that I just keep playing with it and mimicking the examples until I learn it enough to do my own thing.
first time I learned a programming language (it was BASIC by that time) when I was 10 years old, I used the same way I still use till the moment.
Get code samples, compile or run, see the results, hack into arguments and study the differences
Buy a book and start writing a non-trivial app with that language or tool try to choose a brand new app that you have never written before , encounter problem and find its solution
Start with a book. Read forum
question in that area, this gives you
an idea how that new language works,
you will get a feel of it. Try
examples. start with as simple as - Hello world.
I tried Selenium IDE, RC the same way. It's a automated testing tool.
port all your apps to the new language. This ALWAYS works for me and seems to have the shortest learning curve (about 2 weeks to adequate fluency)
I take usually take the following steps:
Read some introductory topics about the language to get a feel for how things work, design guidelines, etc.
Start with a trivial app that gets your feet wet, but make sure it's something you'd like to build upon.
Start building out the trivial app. Make it something non-trivial by adding functionality. It will force you to dig into documentation, put in to practice the coding guidelines, and give you a good feel for how applications scale when you start adding functionality (and how to refactor them when needed).
I'll Google around to see which are good tutorials for language X. Then I read one of these tutorials. Then I'll make some Project Euler assignments (always trying to do them in successive order), and then I'll read another tutorial. This will get me started with the basics. Then I'll attempt something bigger.
Really, it's all about practice.
Lie (or "mislead", if you like) your way into a job that requires you to know this language. You will have no choice but to learn it quickly. This is how I learned SQL back in the day.
I generally find a tutorial to acquaint myself with the general syntax and logic, then start writing programs to do various things (I generally don't have any specific thing chosen ahead of time; I generally just go with what I feel like doing) and referencing the documentation when necessary.
For languages I tend to do something like this:
To get good, I need to repeat stage 4 with more ambitious projects over and over for around ten years.
I've found that porting an existing application (that you wrote) is a great way to learn a new language. Since you are porting, you already have the application design work done. This frees you up to focus on language specifics.
I aproach it looking for tutorials using google and after one or two, I start to look for some open source project that uses that language to see how is used in an non trivial system and then start using it.
Once beyond the basics, I will start to follow Q&A forums (like StackOverflow) on the specific language/subject. Often, the questions will just point me to areas of the language I need to explore furher. Once I understand the questions, the answers bring me further along. And if I find myself answering some of the questions, that's a good sign.
I take a job doing it.
I started out with basic and machine language when I was young.
Took a consulting Excel data input job and hated the tedium so I wrote some macros. They were so impressed with the macros that they started paying me 6x more to develop programs for them.
Just after that someone wanted a database program for tracking employee hours--I grabbed a copy of dBase and was able to demo something within a week, fully operational and debugged in a month or so.
Found a job in C--little company willing to take a chance on someone who didn't know the language. Learned it on the fly. Did well enough where I was hired by the customer of a product I had worked on. Once the product was completed, I proposed a simpler version written in VB, they didn't like the "Basic" idea but were willing to let me try (It involved a LOT of screen scraping and string processing, C's worst nightmare).
Learned VB as I coded that. Became a very successful product, and I moved into group where I was able to move the direction of the group towards Java.
More recently I took a pretty big pay cut to work at a company doing web programming so I could more deeply understand the web development world, Ruby on Rails and Agile. (didn't take, by the way, but I'm glad I did it)
Anyway, my point is that to "Learn" a language without using it on a job is mostly pointless. Also, to work where you can just make the most money isn't the "Goal" of life.
Take jobs that make you happy, give you skills and let you do what you want to do. If you don't like programming, become a ski instructor. If you like programming, program!
edit: and for a more direct answer, I find debugging existing code or trying to add a feature to be the best ways to learn a new language. You have example code in front of you and you can look up references on the web. I may pick up a book as a reference if the language doesn't have a tool as powerful as Javadocs, or to teach more advanced techniques at some point.
You did ask how do 'you' go about... Okay, here goes
Well, that's how I learn a new language.
Sorry you asked?
I usually try to understand the syntax and semantics of:
Pretty much in that order, give or take. After that, it depends on what you're using the language for.
One great advantage you can have over other programmers in the field is to know how to read brand new programming languages point-blank. You can do this by learning new languages at a shallow depth to understand why its different from others. (ie lambda expressions, list comprehensions, functions as first-class objects, static and safe typing, etc). Then you know exactly what to look for in another language.
If you have a good fundamental understanding of programming concepts then picking up a new language should be fairly easy, given you have the time to learn.
Whenever I have had to learn a new technology I first figure out how to do certain things with the new language - how does I/O work? Can it connect to a database? If so, how? How do I define and instantiate an object? How can I include external libraries?
Another good trick is to try to re-write a project in the new language. If you have written a blogging system or something similar, try to rewrite it in your new language.
At this time I am teaching myself Ruby on Rails (coming from a ASP/PHP/J2EE background) and I have found that re-writing small projects in RoR has helped me understanding a lot.
I write a raytracer with a good reference beside me. The basic algorithm is well defined, and they've got everything: file io, user interaction, parsing, image construction, math, complex data structures, implementation of common algorithms, recursion, access to native libraries, threading, optimization, etc. Plus, you use a reference model and you can take one glance at the output and know whether things are functioning correctly.
Personally, I tend to grab a well-recommended book and start building some "Hello World" apps which quickly moves into the realm of "How fast can I build a numbers game or web app with full user authentication?".
Right now I'm working on learning ASP.net 3.5 & C#, so while I wait on being able to afford a good book or two, I'm using some video casts on www.asp.net and found a good MVC project entitled NerdDinner. In the end, all of this (I hope) will have been good experience.
I've learned that I can apply my skills of one language on another language. For example one of my friends asked me to help with some Lua and I've never written a line of Lua in my life. I sit down, look at the code and look at the docs. Then I find what I need and write the code, bam, it worked.
Because of this I can virtually use any language in whole world as long as I get the time to understand what I can do and what I can't.
I stare at documentation and try to produce incrementally more complex programs. I've learned that most procedural/imperative languages are essentially the same at the "basic->intermediate" level. Java ~ C ~ C++ ~ C# ~ Perl. Give or take syntax, level of focus, and some quirks. i++ is i++ in any of these languages; a for loop is a for loop.
It's only when you start getting into the mastery of the language that you have to start really running up that heavy learning curve.
When learning anything, I always find the best approach is to use a multi-pronged approach. Using as many different mediums as possible. Mixing action with equal parts book learning (roughly).
Too much action without book knowledge, and you get a lot of code... that stinks. :)
Too much book learning without enough action, and you fail to absorb the material deeply.
And just code everything you can think of.
To really learn a language well, I find it's best to re-implement it myself from machine code.
Over the weekend.
With my eyes closed.