[Courses] [python] Googling isn't cheating :-)

[Natalie Freed]

I'll add something I've found helpful for learning: Google a solution
and make sure I understand it, but then close the window and code it
up myself.

Natalie

On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 12:08 AM, Monique Y. Mudama
<monique at bounceswoosh.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul  7 at 18:57, Akkana Peck penned:
>> In fact, if you think of programmers as people who know everything
>> and just toss off programs without thinking twice, don't!  In
>> practice, a surprisingly large fraction of programming time is spent
>> searching online for documentation, tips and algorithms.  Googling
>> is an important part of being a programmer.  Even if you're
>> completely fluent in Python (or whatever language you're using),
>> there are hundreds of libraries you can use to solve problems
>> without writing everything from scratch, and no one can remember how
>> to use all of them.  (I'll be talking a little about importing
>> libraries in lesson 4.)
>
> I'd like to expand on this - please let me know if I'm stepping on
> toes / spamming / annoying by doing so:
>
> Someone once told me - a good programmer doesn't know everything; but
> she knows where to find it.  That's gotten a lot easier, thanks to
> google (but my husband and I still amass an unreasonable number of
> old-fashioned paper technical books, which you can scribble on,
> hilight, and bookmark.)
>
> This was really driven home for me when I briefly had to work in an
> environment with no internet access.  It felt like coding with
> my brain tied behind my back.
>
> In fact, to me, one of the benefits of your course is that it gives me
> ideas of what to google.  (eg, googling "python printing without spaces"
> and "python printing without newlines" because I felt sure there must
> be a way.)  That led me to read about i/o handling and allowed me to
> recognize some similarities with both old-school C and with perl.
>
> I have never wanted to be defined by a single programming language; I
> want people to see me as someone who solves problems with the best tools
> available.  Realistically, when you switch programming languages every
> few months or so, you aren't going to be able to remember every nuance
> of the language.  Well, I can't speak for you; I know I can't.  I still
> think of Java as my "native" programming language, the one I know most
> intimately, but I haven't written anything significant in Java in years
> - when I next work in Java, I'll be googling like a fiend.
>
> --
> monique
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