Jim Aikin wrote on 11 jul 2008 in comp.lang.javascript
:
On Jul 10, 11:23 am, "Evertjan." <exjxw.hannivo...@interxnl.net>
wrote:
>You cannot learn programming from books, or even from tutorials.
Programming is a hands-on experience.
Not to be snarky or anything, but that seems like a rather extreme
position. Are you suggesting that you yourself learned Javascript (or
any other programming language) without studying it in a book? I don't
think you meant to imply that, but that's what a plain reading of your
statement would suggest.
See Richard's exensive answer about Javascript books.
It is like gardening [of which there seem to be good books, I suppose],
you can learn about flowers and trees, but the hands-on experience will
be far more crucial. And what about singing, painting, doctoring, diving,
banking, etc.?
In programming, much of wat you learn you learn by debugging, from your
mistakes.
Are you suggesting that you yourself learned Javascript (or
any other programming language) without studying it in a book?
Yes, since the little book on Fortran that was given to me arond 1965,
when [mainframe!] hands-on experience was simply not available, I only
read specs, and in Javascript with it's many implementations and flavors,
the spec's are by far secondary [thirdly?] to the experience.
The notion of formatted output, so prominent in that Fortran, simply did
not ring any bell for me then, and I now see many people believing that
the standard way a numeric value is outputted as a string in Javascript
and alike to be the way it is stored in memory. I doubt if you leard
those things in books, without experiencing the practical implications.
Next was the Signetics/Philips 2650 Assembler language, no books,
marginal specs.
Then Central Data Basic for the 2650 [with nice BCD numeric storage!]
written by an upstart named William Gates, we had to retro-engeneer to
give it is full potential.
Etc.
--
Evertjan.
The Netherlands.
(Please change the x'es to dots in my emailaddress)