This advice is generally given to beginners by some people when they ask where they should start learning to program. The advice is to not read a programming book but to pick a text editor and a language and start coding. They can look up the documentation to understand the basic syntax. But how will they learn to build actual programs? More importantly, what will they build? Do they even understand functions and stuff?<p>Nobody tells a wannabe electronics engineer to start with a blank breadboard and start building circuits without the fundamental knowledge of the basic elements like resistor, capacitor, etc and how to form a complete circuit.
The problem in that advice is the "just".<p>Weather is coding or e.g. wood working if you want to learn it you need to do it and just reading up on a ton of theory and advice without doing it is very inefficient as you won't be able to really internalize the advice without some practice related to it.<p>So what you normally do:<p>- you read up a bit on the most fundamental basics, this might be a very small bit like safety advice for wood working or the general idea what a program is<p>- you concurrently start trying it out ("experiments"), start learning more about it and _reflect_ on your experience and results in context of what you learn<p>- you repeat with increasingly more in depth topic<p>- at some point you move from learning with doing experiments not used anywhere, to improving while
practically applying your skills on non experiments.
You still might sometimes need do experiments through
to evaluated if some new understandings you have are right<p>And this can also be used for electronics, e.g. you read about e.g. resisters in a row vs. parallel and then you try it out in an experiment. E.g. with this kind of boards where you can just stick in parts this is pretty easy to do.<p>Anyway here is the 3 rules:<p>1. Learning without practical application is inefficient hard and likely to go somewhat wrong.<p>2. Blindly trying without reflection of why things turned out the way they did tent to yield increasingly less improvements and then stagnate.<p>3. Learning all by yourself without reading up on things and getting other peoples opinions and feedback is making your improvements way slower then they could be.
IMO the main goal of that advice is to get people past "analysis paralysis" and worrying if they're picking "the right tool" when they're just starting out, instead of getting bogged down in endless "FooBar 1.7.2.6.3.6.2 is 0.2% faster for SSRDHTMLZOMGWTFBBQETCETC than BazWat 35.2.4.54.3.3.5.2.43.2" debates.
I think that different advice will help different people. I think it's a bit of a tall order to ask someone to just 'start coding.' That said, there's quite a bit of introductory coding tutorials online that walk you through the 'just open a text editor and code' including describing syntaxes, types, concepts, functionality and so forth.<p>I think that improving your skills, once you've got the general basics down, will occur from just 'start coding' in 2023, though, since there is now Google and ChatGPT to help you along the way if you run into obstacles. Having small mini goals and larger macro goals, and doing what it takes to get small wins on said mini goals, will help a lot.<p>Hope this helps!