Pro-tips
This chapter will teach you some useful tricks that all computer science students should know.
When you don't know how to program something
The first thing to do is search for it on Google, Duckduckgo or similar web search sites.
Writing good searches
This may seem like a joke but a good estimate would be that over half of all new students have issues finding answers online. It is easy to get low-quality results but you can take a few steps to ensure that you get mostly good-quality results.
Before we begin, keep in mind that you will get much better results if you search in English, compared to any other language.
First, we have to decide what we want to know. As an example, we would like to know how to reverse a list in python. Good searches are usually in the form <what you want> <language or program you want to use>. So for our example, we might search for How to reverse a list in python, but this is more verbose than it has to be, reverse list python works just as well.
If possible, search directly on sites that know have good results. For example, Stackoverflow is a place where developers can ask questions and everybody can answer, think of it as Wikipedia but for questions related to programming. Be skeptical and understand that most programming answers are good enough rather than strictly correct and you will most likely have to adapt the solution to your specific problem.
Finding good search results
There are countless sites offering programming advice. Avoid sites that look like news articles or have short sentences, these are usually either computer-generated or written to rate high up on search results. If possible try and find the official documentation. Remember that you can use !kbd[!ctrl+F] to find content on the page.
Official or high-quality sources
- Stackoverflow (and other sister-sites)
- Hoogle, search haskell functions
- MDN, web technologies such as HTML, CSS, Javascript