Some time ago, I did an experiment to see just how much I could learn with an Assimil course when learning with ease, as the books are titled. It turned out I could pick up a fair amount of Alsatian, at least for passive use. Now there’s a group experiment at HTLAL. If you’d like to see how a variety of people do with Assimil courses for different languages, you can read the log here.

Last time, I wrote about Python. But then something came up in the middle. I signed up for CS50x, a Harvard computer science course through edx.org. The course is mainly using C, with a bit of PHP and JavaScript to come. It’s been years since I waded through a C course, but the little bit I picked up is not entirely forgotten. So I’ve adopted the method of the Teach Yourself Python the Hard Way, by taking pains to physically type in all the programs as they come up in the outside text for the course. And again, the things you get in the habit of typing come much faster than those which are read, then cut and pasted.