I would find some resource of assumed knowledge useful in my career field of chemistry and biology, but what really resonated with me from zedshaw's piece was something even more basic to the field. The biggest hurdle I had to learning to code was finding a text editor. The next big hurdle I had was finding somewhere to host my one-page HTML site. I ended up asking a friend who suggested Sublime Text and Amazon AWS. At that point I'd been reading HN for two years and had heard of these things, but not understood their central utility (or the utility of similar such general services) to doing anything with code. This is the level of beginner that I would hope zedshaw's efforts would target, someone like me from last year.
I want to emphasize that while learning abstract functions, and understanding that code syntax is an abstraction for electrons moving through logic gates are fundamental concepts for an early programmer, learning those concepts was less frustrating for me than finding somewhere to write the text I had learned from codecademy. I am a chemist by formal training, I took an extremely abstract multivariable calc course in college that taught me Big and Little O, and functionalized concepts most people learn by rote "drills," and I consider learning new concepts my strongest career skill. I don't mean to humblebrag here, but rather to refute the only-somewhat-popular sentiment I've seen on HN that non-coders "can't get shit done." No. I am a non-coder that does shit. In moving from chemistry to neurobiology and biophysics, there are basic skills that can't be found in a textbook, like _this is a pipette_, and _this is a flask to grow cells_, and if you don't know those things you won't be able to do experiments, and you'll fail the informal subtext of an interview. The best resource I've found in (three years of reading HN anonymously) for analogous tool-teaching in code has been Michael Hartl's book on learning Rails, so thanks again mhartl! The first two chapters of that resource were more treacherous (but ultimately well-guided and successful) than teaching myself d3.js. A true, zero-level, adult beginner's guide to some code---manipulating an excel sheet in Python, writing an API-interacting tweet bot---would be a great boon to people like me.
I want to emphasize that while learning abstract functions, and understanding that code syntax is an abstraction for electrons moving through logic gates are fundamental concepts for an early programmer, learning those concepts was less frustrating for me than finding somewhere to write the text I had learned from codecademy. I am a chemist by formal training, I took an extremely abstract multivariable calc course in college that taught me Big and Little O, and functionalized concepts most people learn by rote "drills," and I consider learning new concepts my strongest career skill. I don't mean to humblebrag here, but rather to refute the only-somewhat-popular sentiment I've seen on HN that non-coders "can't get shit done." No. I am a non-coder that does shit. In moving from chemistry to neurobiology and biophysics, there are basic skills that can't be found in a textbook, like _this is a pipette_, and _this is a flask to grow cells_, and if you don't know those things you won't be able to do experiments, and you'll fail the informal subtext of an interview. The best resource I've found in (three years of reading HN anonymously) for analogous tool-teaching in code has been Michael Hartl's book on learning Rails, so thanks again mhartl! The first two chapters of that resource were more treacherous (but ultimately well-guided and successful) than teaching myself d3.js. A true, zero-level, adult beginner's guide to some code---manipulating an excel sheet in Python, writing an API-interacting tweet bot---would be a great boon to people like me.