For me, I think I understand attention is the most important factor in learning, followed by practice.
The material is the base, sometimes a bad quality material can even reinforce practice and attention.
I remember how I learned serious programming at 14: a badly translated manual in French and a casio scientific calculator, no internet. I had to try each command, see what it did, guesstimate what it meant. I plowed through variables, goto/labels, printing, conditionals, had lots of problems conceptualising loops but figured it out talking with friends at school who struggled too, and ended up doing decent things with the calculator.
When I started C at uni, nothing was new (except pointers, I admit lol): the very good material didnt help my fellow students much, in fact I remember helping them a lot gain a more intuitive understanding on what programs were and to love programming for the sake of it, me who learned from sheer frustration and trial and error with basically rope and wood.
So I dunno... maybe I could have optimized my time but I still believe the sheer will to learn how machines ticked is what mattered, more than anything and that s always how I teach someone new to it: love the result and the process, independently of the details of implementation and you ll be able to program anything or at least know you CAN program anything eventually given enough courage and commitment.
And at work, I m the multi hat guy who code on all the systems, on all the languages, always coming in as a humble idiot but slowly gnawing at the problems until I become expert and people at it for years start asking me questions, because I just never give up and never think it's too hard.
The material is the base, sometimes a bad quality material can even reinforce practice and attention.
I remember how I learned serious programming at 14: a badly translated manual in French and a casio scientific calculator, no internet. I had to try each command, see what it did, guesstimate what it meant. I plowed through variables, goto/labels, printing, conditionals, had lots of problems conceptualising loops but figured it out talking with friends at school who struggled too, and ended up doing decent things with the calculator.
When I started C at uni, nothing was new (except pointers, I admit lol): the very good material didnt help my fellow students much, in fact I remember helping them a lot gain a more intuitive understanding on what programs were and to love programming for the sake of it, me who learned from sheer frustration and trial and error with basically rope and wood.
So I dunno... maybe I could have optimized my time but I still believe the sheer will to learn how machines ticked is what mattered, more than anything and that s always how I teach someone new to it: love the result and the process, independently of the details of implementation and you ll be able to program anything or at least know you CAN program anything eventually given enough courage and commitment.
And at work, I m the multi hat guy who code on all the systems, on all the languages, always coming in as a humble idiot but slowly gnawing at the problems until I become expert and people at it for years start asking me questions, because I just never give up and never think it's too hard.