Learn a language you do not know

Picking up a language usually starts with an afternoon of installing it. You can skip that part, which matters most for the languages you are only deciding whether to learn.

Every language opens with a small working program. Run it first, and you know the language works before you write anything.

• Follow a tutorial

  Guided topics for C, C++, Java, JavaScript, PHP and Python, in modules from beginner upward, with runnable examples throughout.

  Good for a language you are starting properly.

• Work from what you know

  Write the thing you already know how to write in another language, and find out what this one does differently.

  Good for a language you are evaluating rather than committing to.

Keep it in one place

Practice scatters. Half of it ends up in a folder you will not open again and the rest in a tab you closed.

Save the pieces as projects instead. They are on your account rather than a machine, so the exercise you wrote on your laptop is there on your work machine, and My Projects filters by language, which is how a month of learning stays easy to look back over.

Name them for what they demonstrate rather than what you were doing at the time. generics is findable; test2 is not.

What next

When the thing you are learning outgrows one file, or needs a library, that is a project rather than a run.