Weekly Question
Q: What's the best way to pick up a new language?
Let's say that you already know JavaScript pretty well and that after a few years you want to pick up Python, to see what the fuss is all about. I've been in that situation myself, as professionally I've never been asked to work on anything related to Python. But I'm a fan of scripting languages, so why not add it to my toolkit.
And now I know Python decently well. Well enough to write a few helpful scripts here and there. So here's how I personally picked it up in a relatively short amount of time, and it's essentially what I did in college for any new language that was required to learn.
For one, you need the tools, so install whichever compiler, interpreter, runtime, SDKs, etc needed to get started. And after it's installed, you'll probably need to spend some time figuring out how to compile, interpret or transpile the given language. ChatGPT can come in handy here.
And here's where most people get lost, because there are multiple ways to go about learning the actual syntax. You have blog posts (such as mine), YouTube videos, online courses, books and some people just download random projects from a repo and start investigating.
But I always recommend to just go the official documentation before anything else. For one, it's typically free. But more importantly, it's probably been there for years upon years and it knows the language better than any 30 minute video that you'll find online. And it's probably going to take longer than 30 minutes to get through it.
It might take weeks and you might fall asleep every single time, but in the end you'll have a more well-rounded view of the language as a whole, and not in broken up chunks that may or may not relate.
Have a question? You can submit it here and I might answer it in the next newsletter.
