Developer Fundamentals: Contextual asides for self taught coders

Developer Fundamentals: Contextual asides for self taught coders

One of the biggest obstacles for learning a new skill set is that every learning resource assumes some pre-existing knowledge. As succinctly observed by xkcd in the provided historical artifact, for something to be a thing everyone knows, everyone has to have a first day that they learn it:

Contextual asides for self-taught coders are posts which aim to provide some basic context on a core concept for folks who are exploring self-driven resources for learning coding skills.

These concepts tend to be overloaded with potential meanings and historical usage, so we aim to provide just the definitions and related info we think will be most useful to people who are teaching themselves coding skills using freely available resources.

Current asides:

• Developer Fundamentals: Variables
• Developer Fundamentals: Parameters

We'll update this post as more topics are written up.  Future topics we're thinking about include scope, classes, types, apis, regex, and version control. If you've got an idea for a contextual aside topic, please provide your suggestion using this form.