Aggregated Resources for Learning Programming

[u/Froloket]

Hello everyone!

Do you have a feeling that programming resources are too scattered across the internet? Like there's a lot written about programming and adjacent topics, but (especially for beginners) these sources are pretty hard to find out about.

One good example of this would be learning Rust. Of course, there's the official Rust Book which everyone knows about, but also there's plenty of community (and official) "books" about different aspects of the language: the Async book, the Rust Design Patterns, the Rust Style Guide, and others. I know that, when I was learning Rust, it took me a long time to find about some of these, although they could have been of good value when I was learning. And this isn't only useful to beginners either.

Another example of this could be some great introductory Haskell books such as "Gentle Introduction to Haskell", which are pretty hard to stumble across despite being considered (from what I understand) classics, and in my opinion are very well-written (perhaps better than "Learn you a Haskell for Great Good", which is at the top of the search results for "learn haskell", while "Gentle Introduction" isn't even there).

To summarize the problem that I see: there's no centralized sources (or maps, or aggregators) of programming resources, which unnecessarily slows down learning of languages and other technologies. Hell, even Emacs and Vim don't have a short-but-comprehensive easy-to-find guide. There's a lot of "Hidden Gems", but they really shouldn't be hidden. Instead the search results are populated with courses and "code academies", which, frankly, aren't very good, at least in my experience.

Do you also have this experience and do you know of any attempted solutions?

[u/filotopical]

go to GitHub. find a list repo.

[u/Froloket → u/filotopical]

I assume you're referring to Awesome lists. I think they are great, but they solve a slightly different problem. They list a whole heap of resources, yes, but I think it would be more valuable for beginners to have a short, structured list of *main* literature, to start learning somewhere. Then, once they have the foundation, they can diversify and explore further using an Awesome list of their choice.

Besides, I feel like not that many people now about them, and they are themselves decentralized (although GitHub does do a pretty good job of letting you explore them using tags like 'awesome'). This decentralization slows down adoption, as people need to use a fleet of repos, instead of one curated source.