How to get started reading and learning from other people's code?
Posted by random-kid24@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 11 comments
I feel like i need to read code to learn common and good ways of doing certain things. I often do some things and they work but most of the time they aren't really the good way doing it. I feel like to get better, i need to read other people's code and learn how they think and solve the problem. But i am not sure where to get started. GitHub seems intermedating, i have to understand whole project structure first to understand any part it. I wish i could do some casual reading of some specific problem and others code for it when i have some time.
Any suggestions?
timhurd_com@reddit
When you learn a spoken language, you learned in school how to write it as much as speak it and listen to it. Your brain learned how to say things based off of the way others say it. Have you ever wondered how accents work? You heard your parents, who might have lived in the Southern US speak with a "twang" in their voice and your brain picked it up.
Same with coding. As you expose yourself to other peoples code, read it, understand it, ask questions about it including "Why" you will begin to see the patterns and develop your own coding style. It is just part of entrenching yourself in the coding culture and it is good to learn to write better and in some cases see others with worse solutions and to avoid those. Just like you may learn to say "John and I..." rather than "John and me...".
Read coding books and look at their examples, I find that is the greatest way to learn good coding practices as those examples are often peer reviewed. But of course, always ask yourself if it could be done better. ;)
mother_maryYy@reddit
If you want to learn different projects or application clones, go to google and search "Project Based Learning Github" here is the link https://github.com/practical-tutorials/project-based-learning
There's a lot of tutorials of programming languages there based on what you want to learn. Right now, I am learning to build mobile apps and I just choose what language I want to use and it's really helpful for me so far.
Hope this helps! Goodluck!
2createanewaccountus@reddit
sometimes this can be difficult to do ( for me at least ) because of looking at so many examples of what people are doing but no explanation why and depending on how big the project, can take awhile to map out thier logic/flow of things.
if you're looking at the same person's code ( regardless of projects ) you start seeing patterns in how/why they do things which make it easier to understand ( at least it did for me at my last gig ) .
Mysterious_Screen116@reddit
How to get started? By doing it. Wdym? You surely use other packages, so start by reviewing code that you import.
zdxqvr@reddit
I would never discourage someone from reading other people's code, but the only suggestion I have is that other people's code is not always good. Just because a package is published doesn't mean it's perfect, sometimes things are just means to an end. If you read other people's code I'd suggest reading the code of smaller packages you have used before so you are least know what the package is used for, it will help you understand it better. And focus on evaluating the decisions that developer made, both good and bad. But fair warning this can be pretty difficult to understand the totality of another person's code without them exactly explaining it to you.
sidit77@reddit
This isn't really true. You should read larger codebases like you read Wikipedia: You use Google to find a starting point and then you follow links until you find what you were interested in. Nobody reads Wikipedia front-to-back or top-down.
For example, if you wanted to know how chrome implements screen sharing you could start by searching through the entire codebase for keywords like "Displaymedia" or "capture" until you find something that looks promising. From this point you can follow the program structure (i.e call sites of my current function vs. function calls in my current function body) until you arrive at the level your interested in.
Or to put it differently, you can read the implementation of the standard library of a programming language without knowing about every single program that uses it. The reverse is also true. You can typically read a program without stepping down to the absolutely lowest levels.
luddens_desir@reddit
Find something you're interested in working with that's open source, see if you can understand the code and contribute to it. For instance, if you're interested in music, or making sounds, you could download Audacity, and contribute to the code base because it's open source.
If you like 3D modeling you can do the same for Blender. Do you like game dev? All of the idtech engines up until 4 are open source and you can do almost anything you want with them.
It helps to download a tool that allows you to visualize the entire code base and break it down into smaller pieces. For instance, there's a tool called graphviz, which you can get something called the 'dot' plugin for. You can take a massive 400k line codebased and visualize it in terms of relationships and files so anything you want to understand you can comprehend it quickly.
Hope that helps.
random-kid24@reddit (OP)
Thank you, it helps I never knew anything like graphviz. It might come in handy
steveplaysguitar@reddit
I've done this from practical experience in the work place as a PLC coder in manufacturing. When I graduated I thought I was pretty good at it. Then I got to see the code behind complex machinery while troubleshooting errors and had a ton of "oh I never would have thought of that" moments.
Make sure your fundamental foundation is solid and you can readily build off it. Currently I'm working on getting good at python with self study in between classes and have seen a whole lot of things that gave me that same "ahah!" reaction, especially in machine learning and data applications.
rab1225@reddit
its not that i instantly understand someone else's code. it is just that you will start to see certain "patterns" at one point and you can make a guess on what a certain piece of code does due to this.
LilaDawnx@reddit
Idk for me effective problem solving came from really understanding the basics of the language you work in / the basics of computer programming because even if you read other people’s code to see what’s “best” you might not fully understand why they did that. Once you better understand why someone did something you can validate if it’s actually the best way of doing things. Than when it comes time for you to write code you can really think about what you need to achieve and fundamentally how to get there.