Yetin Guide for Coding

It is better to teach people fishing than to give them fish. – Chinese Proverb

This is a guide for self studying computer science, i.e., coding. The targeted audience are those with little or no experience of coding, and those who have learned coding only for a specific task but lack the systematic knowledge. The only prerequisites are a personal computer and the determination to learn.

The abundance of information on the internet makes self-studying coding possible, but it does not make it easy. These information is disorganised and unequal on quality, with some even blatantly false. It is impossible for beginners to organise the informations, judge their correctness, overcome all the troubles of understanding them, and make coherent plans for what to learn next. This book will help you conquer these problems.

Specifically, it will help you in two ways:

1. It will teach you enough knowledge so that you can study computer science by yourself,
2. It will provide for you enough recourses for further study.

If you do not plan to study computer science, I encourage you to try. Computer science and related technologies has influenced every aspect of our lives. Not understanding how they work is the modern illiteracy.

Computer science is a new born subject, and many of its denominations have not been settled. The term ‘coding’ is usually used synonymously with computer science. This book will adopt this custom, and use coding to mean both the act of writing the code and the complex theories behind it.

Logistics

As of September 2024, the book is still in early draft. The content is prereleased on book.yetin.net and Github.

All suggestions and criticisims are warmly welcomed as issues on Github.