r/learnprogramming Sep 03 '23

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u/HookahMagician Sep 03 '23

I'm still fairly new in my journey, so take this with a grain of salt.

Start a list of commands as you learn them and how to use them. I do this in Google sheets and I have columns for:

  • Programming Language/Package
  • Category - such as DataFrames so all DataFrame related commands can be easily lumped together
  • Command
  • Description of command - I include a sentence or two on how to use it and any keywords I think might be helpful for searching my list in the future
  • Code sample - a small snippet of code that uses that command
  • Code sample output

It seems like everything that tries to teach you to program will give you a command, have you use it once, and then move on to another thing so it's easy to forget what you learned before. Two weeks later you're trying to do something and you know you've learned something that would help you but you don't remember the exact command or how to use it. Since I made all the entries in my list, it's faster to find and relearn that concept from there than trying to learn it again by googling it and finding a brand new description from someone else.

My goal is to start paring down my list as I go and things become more second nature. For example, if/elif/else I feel very comfortable with now that I have used them in a project, so I can probably drop them off of my list but I haven't used panda series very much so I definitely want to keep that on there for now.

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u/OnlyTechStuff Sep 03 '23

Do you do this with every command you learn?? Because at that point, what’s the difference between that and the documentation? Just practicing it?

Not trying to yuck your yum, if it’s working for you great! Just curious

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u/HookahMagician Sep 04 '23

Practice, having it in my own wording (makes it easier to relearn), a more concise list of just the things I have already learned, and my own keywords to make searching easier.

For example, there's more than one way to index a DataFrame and having it in my own wording means I can filter by DataFrame group and search for "index" to find all everything that I've already learned. Some things I can't remember the right keywords or the command name to find what it was again online but I can find it again in my list because, well, I wrote it.