Swaroop C H

Buddy, I completely understand your pain. I did my engineering at NIT (it was called REC when I graduated) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institutes_of_Technology] and I also suffered in first two semesters because I did not play the game which others were playing just to get good grades. The focus was on grades, not learning. Later I realized that playing game of grades is not much of an effort so why not play the game and keep doing what I love to do on the side? In my final year, I was in Top 10 students in my batch. In last two years of college, I also did freelance coding for some clients in USA which helped me pay for all my expenses (tuition/pocket money/party/vacation). When college was over and it was time to face the real world, everyone who only focused on the grades suffered and I aced the interviews, found a job which I loved and finally moved to USA. Read patio11's career advice: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/ For a example which you can relate to, see Swaroop [http://www.swaroopch.com/]. He didn't graduate from IIT but worked for Yahoo, Adobe, some Internet startup and he is finally doing freelancing and recently did some work for Joshua [http://www.swaroopch.com/blog/freelancing-for-joshua-schachter/]. He doesn't even mention his degree on his blog, he lets his work speak for itself. So don't get discouraged, play the game but focus on your passion. Everything else will fall in place. If you want to talk,…

Use Pomodoro technique. I had written about my favorite book on the subject a few years ago - http://www.swaroopch.com/2011/01/17/pomodoro/

"A byte of Python" is the best book I've seen so far that caters to a beginner audience. All you need to know about computers to read this book is to how to save text files. Really engaging. http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/python/

I highly recommend A Byte Of Vim for anyone wanting to learn the editor: http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Vim

In addition to all the excellent suggestions here, I will also suggest reading the free book "A Byte of Vim" (http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Vim_en:Table_of_Contents). This is how the book introduces itself: "A Byte of Vim" is a book which aims to help you to learn how to use the Vim editor (version 7), even if all you know is how to use the computer keyboard. The first part of this book is meant for new users who want to understand what Vim is and learn how to use it. The second part of this book is for people who already know how to use Vim and want to learn about features that make Vim so powerful, such as windows and tabs, personal information management, making it a programmer's editor, how to extend Vim with your own plugins, and more.

Byte of Python: http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Python Dive into Python: http://diveintopython.org/ Both great and free books.

Nice approach. It feels very similar to "tracer bullet" development (I think coined by the pragmatic programmer book), where you get something end-to-end as quickly as possible and then start iterating on the parts. (https://www.swaroopch.com/tracer-bullet-development/ explains it too)

Good alternative: A byte of Vim - http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/vim/ Sidenote: The navbar & images break on smaller screens.

Semi-ignorant :) I knew of org-mode as emacs only, but the grandparent post mentioned mobile & browser snippets. Just found two apps which edit & sync org-mode files, and templates for bookmarks. Android app uses ssh, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.matburt.mobileorg&am… iOS app uses dropbox, https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mobileorg/id634225528?mt=8 Blog post on replacing other svcs/apps with org-mode, http://www.swaroopch.com/2013/01/16/orgmode/ Web bookmark sync on mobile, http://karl-voit.at/2014/08/10/bookmarks-with-orgmode/

You can download python's offline documentation (full) from : http://docs.python.org/2.7/download.html This ebook : "A Byte of Python" is really good : http://swaroopch.com/notes/python/ and is free to download.

Well, "A Byte of Python" is good to start resource! http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Python

I'd say Python has more resources for beginners, since it was picked up ~ 2008 as the teaching language by majors universities and high schools (for example when at MIT's "CS101" originally via Scheme switched to Python). Since then many quality materials for beginners sprung up in Python. To name a few: http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Python http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html

Vim. Please see recently posted link: Coming Home to Vim. http://stevelosh.com/blog/2010/09/coming-home-to-vim/ And also: http://www.swaroopch.com/blog/bash-vim-setup/

When I was looking for a vim-orgmode, I found viki/deplate : I found it quite confusing but it seems to take much inspiration from org-mode, is mature, and integrates with TVO (the vim outliner). Some references : Viki : http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=861 TVO : http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=517 Some notes from Swaroop C H :http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Vim_en:Personal_Information_Management

A Known Buyer and http://www.swaroopch.com/blog/serious-before-startup/

Pretty cool, I was learning Vim through "A Byte of Vim" at http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Vim

Vim Recipes: http://vim.runpaint.org/toc/ A Byte of Vim: http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Vim This cheatsheet has worked really well for me: http://www.viemu.com/vi-vim-cheat-sheet.gif

Agree, it is too verbose. If I am using vim, I won't be looking for cookbook entry explaining simple tasks. There is probably be audience who'd benefit from the book, but does not appeal to me. I've found A Byte of VIM to be quite useful, though: http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Vim

What do you like to do? Generally "hacking" on projects is easier when you're hacking on something you like. If you have nothing in particular you want to do, maybe you can hack on some open source projects? If you've literally just downloaded python and downloaded/opened IDLE, then maybe you should learn some python: I've found this guide to be very useful: http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/python/ An interesting thing you could probably do with not-too-much python is some light data analysis. Download an interesting data dump from somewhere, and see if you can use python to parse through the data and find anything interesting. Free Forex Historical Data (an old link I had saved, not sure if it will be any good): http://www.histdata.com/ Uber pickup data from NYC: https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/uber-tlc-foil-response Maybe even find some data related to something you're interested in, and do some analysis with that.

I've recently invested some time in learning to use vi proficiently, beyond the basic hjkl movement and i/Esc I've installed the Vrapper plug-in for eclipse as well... but since I find eclipse to be full of features but bloated as hell I've done some research on how to use Vi/m as an IDE. I recommend to everyone eager to learn Vim, this free book A byte of Vim - http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Vim There are a number of Vim scripts to ease developing, and thus making Vim become more of an IDE. For example: Vim trinity http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=2347 includes the useful NERD_tree, taglist and srcexpl NERD_commenter http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1218 mru.vim http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=521 xml.vim http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1397 There are many more plugins, and a lot of language-dependent plugins to help you develop in your language of choice, be it java, ruby, python, C, etc I guess a great part of HN users are already masters of Vi/m, but I thougt this could be helpful for those still in their path to Virvana

Free books: http://diveintopython.org/ http://gnosis.cx/TPiP/ (txt processing) http://www.swaroopch.com/byteofpython/ http://homepage.mac.com/s_lott/books/python.html http://homepage.mac.com/s_lott/books/oodesign.html