It's really not Stack Overflow that we should be asking about, it's Google.

Programming became a lot easier when you could just type a question into Google and it would find that someone asked the same question in some forum or newsgroup. In 2003 Google would always include results in a site called Experts' Exchange, which was basically an earlier version of Stack Overflow.

What was different, though, before Google, was that when I got stuck, I often spent a lot of time inventing (or guessing,) a workaround, and my workaround was often incorrect, fragile, slow, ect. In today's world, I'll often see the workaround show up on Stack Overflow first, and then a better answer show up, and then a better answer.

(edit) Another difference is that documentation is essentially annotated today. If the documentation is confusing or misleading, it's usually clarified in a stack overflow or some other forum. Before Google, if documentation was confusing, you were stuck guessing or hacking. That was very time consuming.(/edit)

So basically, before Stack Overflow / Google, there was no globally searchable database of questions and answers. You would get stuck on simple things for a long time, and move much slower.

I'm self-taught, and now in my 50s.

I started programming when I was 10, in 1976. In those earliest days of consumer-class computers, there wasn't really a developed market for practical programming books. However, the manuals that came with software or OSes were quite well-written. There were a few magazines, too, like BYTE and Dr. Dobbs Journal, that published source code -- always the best way to learn!

It helped, too, that my dad was a programmer. I learned most of the basics about computer architecture, binary logic, algorithms, etc., from talking with him.

There were local user groups, though most of the folks were enthusiasts, not necessarily programmers.

By the early 80s, I was reading the C manual by K&R and other books on practical programming, and trying things on my home CP/M system (Heathkit H89). If I had problems (and I often did), I simply had to experiment, read more, think more, debug more.

I first got online around 1980 -- via dial-up BBSes, then the early Internet (ARPAnet), and USENET. While you generally couldn't search for answers/code the way you can now, you could browse, and you could certainly ask people who knew, or at least could offer suggestions.

Finally, I think it's been an advantage that for most of my programming life, I've used Unix, and most of the versions I used included source, which is always educational.

Personally, I don't find learning to program new things as much fun as I did when I was 13-20. I would learn assembly, c++, basic, etc, all from books I got from Hastings or the local computer store.

I didn't know if what I was doing had already been done, I struggled and struggled and struggled until I figured out the right answer, learning how other things worked with every failure.

Now, jumping straight to the right answer eliminates all those other things I learned along the way.

I believe I was a more well-rounded and talented programmer when I was 15 than I am now pushing 40.

Anyway, maybe I just miss those years where I had 100 hours a week to teach myself something new and fun. I could never find the time for that now, and so jumping to the right answer is really my only option.

I started in the late 80s. Around the final wave of the "every child must be taught BASIC and programming so they don't get left behind" movement. Sound familiar?

I had the manual that came with my computer and a library that archived copies of Byte and Compute! I mostly re-typed in games and messed around with those.

In the 90's I guess computers were pretty normal to me. So when I wanted to make computer games like the ones I was obsessed with I had an idea of what to do. I had a bit of dosh to get some books of my own... mostly tech manuals that came with limited trial versions of Turbo C. I was a teenager and didn't have a lot of money so I learned how to get around that so I could continue making my cheesy space shooters and pizza delivery games.

I also had an account on local BBSs before the Internet came. Many helpful people there. Fido mail. One BBS even had an NNTP and email service... but I didn't really use that as much as the books because the turn-around for an answer was still pretty slow. It was often much faster to just look it up in a book or try taking a stab at it yourself and figuring out your own solution.

I mostly just kept making things. The Internet just brought an audience for those things beyond my limited circles.

I guess mostly you just had to be motivated and a little clever to figure out what you didn't know and solve the problem with good, old thinking and experimentation.

I'm not sure why this is even a question, nobody can learn a subject only from a Q&A tool. You learn programming by reading a comprehensive tutorial(s) or book(s) for the foundations. Then you practice on real problems and research the advanced tools and APIs as needed. If you've got more experienced human mentors you go to them for help. You follow blogs / news articles and watch tech conferences. You get enough experience and solve enough hard problems until you know your tools and how to use them effectively.

Google (of which Stack Overflow is only one of many results) is for when you get stuck on some specific problem and need help. Nowadays we just see Stack Overflow in the search results more often than not. I guess SO means nowadays its easier to find answers to specific questions but I don't see how you could actually learn programming from the bottom up that way. It also encourages blind copy and paste solutions without actually understanding the mechanics of the underlying technical problem.

Stack Overflow is very useful, but you need to take it into context like anything else. Many stack overflow answers are still poor quality, outdated, lacking some context, or just outright wrong. Just because its on the internet and a lot of people have looked at it doesn't mean the right person who really knows the subject matter has not only read the answers but cared enough and had enough free time to produce a good detailed answer.

Books. Lots and lots of books. And computer shows where you could pick up boxed software (OS, compilers, etc.) for anywhere from 50 - 90% off.

Wasn't until 1995 that I discovered gcc which led to my discovery of GNU/Linux shortly after. Before that I scrimped and saved and waited for trade shows to pick up new books and versions of MS programming tools for DOS, Win 3.1 and then Windows 95. After that I ran a duel boot system to keep learning Windows and start taking advantage of free software. This was also about the time it became easy and affordable for me to be on the internet regularly and the ldp[1] was a great place to go instead of using dead trees.

Before Linux I could not afford access to any type of UNIX system (except maybe Xenix, saw that a lot at shows, was always tempted but never made the plunge). I did not know about *BSD at the time.

[1]http://tldp.org/

In the early 1980s I was a starving artist in Denver, Colorado. I was trying to simultaneously finish a physics degree, work a full-time job, learn martial arts, write and perform avant-garde electronic pop music, and help my girlfriend raise a small child.

(I continued this general strategy of doing way too much stuff and getting way too little sleep all the time until it all came crashing down on me in 2004, and my life changed drastically and permanently.)

Apple released the Mac, and I fiddled around with it. I really loved MacPaint, but there was no way I could possibly scrape together enough money for a Mac. They were twenty-five hundred dollars. It might as well have been a million. Some years my annual income didn't break $5,000.

Nevertheless, my newfound fascination with digital painting led me to start reading everything I could find about programming, mostly in books and hobbyist magazines. There was a plethora of geeky computing magazines in the middle of the 1980s.

Eventually, with my girlfriend's help, I scraped together enough money to buy a bargain-basement Commodore 128. It wasn't a Mac, but it had a BASIC interpreter built in and it could display graphics. They were 8-bit color graphics with huge, fat pixels on a 320x240 screen, but they were graphics.

I started buying COMPUTE! Magazine. Each issue shipped with a piece of software in it, in the form of a BASIC program printed in a column in the magazine. You could type it into the Commodore and presto! You had a new piece of software!

The transformative event for me was typing in an assembler written in BASIC. After that I could write programs in assembly language. I bought a big fat book that documented the Commodore memory map, listing everything in the machine's memory along with all the addresses. It listed the entry-points for all the built-in BASIC subroutines. I could write machine-language programs that used the built-in BASIC graphics routines!

I wrote a crappy little paint program that I called "ChocolatePaint". It was horrible. Trying to write MacPaint for an 8-bit 320x240 screen and a cheap joystick is a terrible idea. However, I also discovered Conway's Life and got sucked into a black hole of cellular automata.

I spent months on successive versions of a 2D cellular automata program that ran several sets of rules simultaneously on the same grid. There were N sets of rules. Each cell of the grid obeyed all N sets of rules at the same time. The color and text-character displayed at each cell depended on the ruleset that caused it to be considered alive (all dead cells were rendered as empty black squares).

I would stay up too late at night fiddling with my cellular automaton, then fall into bed thinking about ways to improve it until I fell asleep, leaving the thing running overnight. I would get up too early in the morning and rush in to see what the program had produced. Sometimes it was a black wasteland with maybe a few live cells here and there. Sometimes it was a riot of color as some ruleset had mostly taken over, occasionally providing fertile habitats for secondary rulesets to thrive in.

One day, when I was juggling work on a graduate degree in psychology, songwriting, working in a bookstore, and this cellular automata craziness, while exploiting the bookstore job to read every book and magazine title that had anything whatsoever to do with programming, I learned that my girlfriend was going to have my child. Uh-oh. Sub-$10K income looked even less attractive than before.

My mother, a member of Mensa, sent me an ad from the Mensa Bulletin asking for people to apply to Apple Computer to work as technical writers. I said to myself, "why not?" And sent in my application.

To my complete astonishment, Apple flew me out to Cupertino to interview, then made me a job offer that would multiply my income by a factor around ten, and that would represent a whole number multiple of the most money I had ever made in a year in my life. To work with and on programming systems for Apple products!

I said, "sure!"

I officially started work in Cupertino on January 1, 1988, but that was a Friday. I don't remember for sure, but I imagine I didn't really start until the following Monday.

Apple drastically accelerated my self-education in programming. It had several resources that were like heaven for me:

- the Internet Apple had one of the earliest domain names assigned, and a great big chunk of IP addresses. It had a dialup network for employees that bridged to the Internet. It supported uucp. Woohoo! Apple had connections to everybody on the net and repositories of all the software anywhere that anybody thought was interesting. Oaklisp! Smalltalk-80! AT&T CFront! Eiffel! Icon! FigFORTH! MIT Scheme! Minix! GNU! I promptly downloaded every free compiler and interpreter and OS I could find and set about learning all I could about them.

- the technical library Apple had a robust library of technical books for any employee to check out. In order to ensure that its library was the best it could possibly be, it had a policy that I took full advantage of: if you went looking for a book there and they didn't have it, you could file a request for them to get it. Not only would they order a copy of the title for the library, they would order an extra copy and give it to the employee who had requested it. I spent hours in there. My collection of technical books on programming and computer science ballooned in size.

- the software library Apple had a software library with policies similar to those of the library of books, except that you couldn't go in and browse the stacks and they wouldn't give you a free copy of the software you requested (a lot of software was pretty expensive). It would, however order enough copies to ensure that you could check one out, and it would allow you to renew your checkout indefinitely. It also had archives of every piece of software that Apple had ever shipped, or that it had ever released internally. My collection of working software ballooned in size. I requested and checked out every compiler and interpreter I could find. I had old versions of Apple Smalltalk and Fabrik and everything else I could find.

- the competitive intelligence library This was Apple's library of actual computing hardware. You couldn't check out the hardware and take it home, but you could reserve time on it. If the machine was connected to the internal network you could get an account on it. They had everything. I spent hours fooling with a Xerox Star. I learned Lisp and Emacs using a Unicos account on Apple's Cray Y-MP. Later I talked someone in ATG into letting me borrow his Symbolics machine. I rolled it into my office, where it stayed for about two years until he decided he missed it and came back and got it.

That, plus lots of conversations and cooperative projects with other programmers working at Apple, is how I did it before Stack Overflow.

I learnt back in the BBC Micro era, when I could get books out of the local library. What I didn't have at that time was a computer - my very first programming had to be done on paper until I could get time on the computers at school.

Later I got a Spectrum; later still a PC. It was vital that these came with BASIC. Paying for development tools would not have happened. Eventually I acquired pirated copies of Turbo Pascal, Microsoft QuickC, and finally a legitimate but already obsolete copy of Borland Turbo C on seven 5.25" floppy disks.

Eventually I also got a modem and could gain access to such troves as the PC Game Programmer's Encyclopedia.

I think the main difference is that if you came up with a question you had to answer it yourself through research or experimentation. If you weren't very persistent, or weren't given the free time to do the necessary self-directed learning, you wouldn't get very far.

Modern knowledge is streamed to you in small fragments. Back then it came in lumps. Multiple-inch-thick lumps. Most of the books were pretty worthless, although the Peter Norton ones I really learnt stuff from.

It was also viable to set out to read the documentation you had cover-to-cover and go looking for interesting or useful things. These days there's almost too much, and it's certainly not linearly structured.

Manuals. Compilers came with comprehensive manuals. When you paid for things like Turbo C++ or Paradox or MS Cobol you got a well edited, indexed and quality printed book that covered the entire language and tools comprehensively. From there you wade into existing code bases, learn by maintaining the work of others, and eventually you originate new work. Along the way you dog-eared the manuals.

The Internet has obviated the need for comprehensive books for the bulk of contemporary programming. I suppose there are obscure enough and/or proprietary platforms that still follow the "comprehensive documentation" approach, but it seems it's possible for widely used tooling to be poorly documented and rely on online forums to fill in the gaps with crowd sourced answers and examples. This makes "mind share" crucial to the usability of a language/platform.

I am sometimes frustrated with the contemporary model, but the old way wasn't a panacea either; just broken differently. If you want a good taste of "what it was like" find the manuals for Turbo C++ 3.0 (1991.) You'll learn things about C/C++ that you've never seen written down anywhere.

The first six months or so that I used Linux (1998), I only had a winmodem for my parent's cheap tower (333Mhz Celeron I think; the kind you got for free if you signed a 3 year dialup contract). I taught myself to program based on examples from a book and documentation that was included with man pages, program source code, and long-form documentation (often found in -doc packages). The book was good for basic syntax and a couple working examples. Source rpms (my first system was Caldera OpenLinux) provided working example code. The doc packages (and sometimes man pages) had more detailed manuals. I spent a decent amount of time downloading early TLDP (I think LDP at the time) manuals and various zine issues onto floppies at my school. I wrote a ton of really bad code. My local libraries didn't really help much as they mostly contained documentation on Windows/Office/DOS and languages that assumed those (being in middle school, I didn't know anyone at a college/university).

Over time, I saved up and bought a Hayes modem and got online. As I read source code I'd try to incorporate techniques I saw into my programs. Some of these turned out to be bad. You knew they were bad when they made your life more complicated without any stated benefit (or when the benefit was paper thin). This wasn't explicitly stated anywhere (as I remember it), but it sorta revealed itself.

Before StackOverflow? Not too bad. Without internet access, though? Much, much harder, or rather, slower - a similar level of information could be obtained but it took phone calls, bus trips to a reference library, etc. Other than that, you just had to figure everything out yourself from the user manuals and experimentation.

Of course, back then computers were much simpler and user manuals were much more complete and lower level, so this still feasible, where it wouldn't be today.

The QBASIC help "file" was really good for its time. That's basically how I learned. That plus a collection of QBASIC programs the nerds at my school passed around and would occasionally add to. Basically, I would open one of those programs up, run it in QBASIC, and if it is awesome, I would try to figure out how it worked. If I came across something I didn't understand, I would pull up the help from QBASIC.

My childhood self-learning experience is a good example of the importance of: 1. "open source" 2. a fast code-run cycle

QBASIC, being an interpreted, pretty much guaranteed these two conditions inadvertently.

I was lucky. Our high school system shared a DEC PDP-8. This was in 1974. Each year, Digital equipment would publish a manual. Some years were better than others. Somewhat like a vintage wine. The choice of languages for the PDP-8 were Basic, Fortran, and Focal. It also had a user group called Decus, which shared code - somewhat akin to GitHub. But, I didn't use much of that code, as it usually meant hand entering the source into a teletype. The storage medium was paper tape.

An alternative to the PDP-8 was the one class in writing Cobol on a mainframe. You had to hand write code on a huge ledger sheet, translate that into punched cards, submit a job, and wait a couple days for the result. Most of my coder buddies thought that was a joke.

Instead we stuck with PDP-8. Because the computer was shared by several schools, there was a huge inter-school rivalry. We would hack accounts, and write incendiary messages in the other school's directory, which could only be erased by writing assembly code.

When I went to university, the first computer science courses still used punched cards. The classes were incredibly boring: with PL-1 examples of how to move pieces around a chess board. No AI. In high school, we were already writing chess player programs, multi-user star wars, compression, social engineering, and infinite precision math packages.

So, I was a bit judgmental about the quality of the University courses and missed out on some important lessons. My first language was Basic. So, my code was a meandering mess of spaghetti. It took a years to unlearn that self-inflicted pedagogical brain damage.

Now, with SO + Git, coding feels like assembling flat-packed Ikea furniture.

[UPDATE] grammar

All these stories are reminding me of m first encounter with programming. My Grandpa gave me his $600 Visual Basic (5?) book + software when I was 13 (~15 years ago). He didn't have the registration key, but I naively thought I could get lucky with a 16+ digit code. The first code I tried failed, but I tried changing the last digit and after a couple of tries got it. I didn't know what it was called at the time, but I instinctively guessed it could be a checksum, and somehow, that's how Microsoft protected their $600 product in 2002. Anyway, my Grandpa passed before I went to college but I think we would have had a lot of fun talking programming, because I was much more interested in pure math in HS when he died. That first programming book was definitely what got me interested though.

Do people really learn _only_ from SO? I mean sure, it can solve problem at hand but learning a new language or technology? I don't see how it could compete with books in any way

A lot of responses have mentioned usenet so I won't repeat.

However, one very important aspect of usenet was the curated FAQ document of the newsgroups (e.g., a FAQ for comp.lang.c [1]).

The document was maintained by the newsgroup maintainers and would be of very high quality, informative and with it's own unique sense of (geek?) humor. I have pored over pages of such documents and have learned a ton and enjoyed doing it.

Interestingly, I remember reading somewhere that stackoverflow.com was developed to eliminate some of the problems associated with maintaining a usenet newsgroup FAQ, e.g., through automatic and community-driven curation, although at this point, it seems like that kind of feature is either not used or not considered super-important. (well, in a way, that's what it's doing, but the final product is access to the answers through google search, not a single FAQ document).

[1] http://c-faq.com/

[2] a tiny list of comp.* newsgroups (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comp.*_hierarchy)

P.S.: Another important resource (in use in the past as well as in the present): irc.freenode.net chatrooms.

Borland C++ came with 5 thick books as a reference. It was great. Powerbasic came with a big book, part tutorial, part reference. Schneider CPC had a big programming book with it. So it wasn't bad at all! When you extended your programs with stuff like mouse-support advanced graphics, you read through the readme.txt that was delivered with the library (the libraries could be bought, were freeware, came from your friend or were delivered on magazine-disktettes). Of course, getting help when unexpected problems popped up, was much more difficult without the internet. But then again, you were usually not mangling with a bunch of languages like (HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, Typescript, Angular, React......) but were rather stuck with one programming language that you used for everything. Basic, Turbo Pascal, C, C++... you used one of them for many years as the average guy. So after some time, you got a feeling for it and could work around problems.

Before SO, you had to visit blogs, forums and "programming resources" websites of vastly varying quality. Most of the examples were poorly formatted and not very elaborately explained. Most forums were run by well-knit communities and had a somewhat hostile attitude to newcomers asking a single question.

This is not an issue in SO – if you write a well-formatted and clear question that may also be beneficial to other people, no one is going to look down on you for having 1 reputation point. You can also find reliable answers to common problems, since these posts become very popular and have strong peer review. An answer at the top with a few hundred upvotes is pretty much "copy-paste safe" :-)

The negative side is that people become too lazy and stop bothering with reading long documentation and articles, which can, IMO, help you build the big picture better, in case you can afford the time.

O'Reilly, did a good line of 'Cookbooks', I think these were a result of many forum questions and answers (most likely iteratively refined) compiled into simple 'recipes'.

Something like: How do I join two strings in Foo? They list a few answers, including a suggested one alongside caveats/pros/cons of each. There's a lot of Stackoverflow there. And they always seemed to provide code that was less abstract and more practical than say a 'Learn Foo' manual.

For me, shit. I was in rural Australia. What I had to do was pour over the documentation and experiment a lot.

Now this was back when is as 9 and using Qbasic though.

I was able to write a bunch of questions to ask the senior teachers at high school, but that only led to more questions.

I did eventually get given c++ by a friend, but I was absolutely stuck.

Admittedly though, the lack of books was the sticking point. I believe if I had a few more text books, that it would have been a hell of a lot easier. Not as easy as im-stick-quickly-google as I do now, but a ton easier.

Hmm after typing this out I realise it doesn't really answer your question, bit I'll post it anyway.

But imho learning from. Textbook with no outside resources (which I did later in life), made me come up with some interesting work around a, which later on gave me insights, but to get software out quickly, SO and Google help a lot.

Not very clear I know, sorry but that's my 2 cents.

In ~1995 I cut enough grass to buy Visual Basic 4. The manual was pretty thick and, it was hard but, I taught myself to program using it. I bought it from a computer store that didn't sell programming books.

Imagine my surprise the first time I walked into a Barnes & Noble.

You would visit the relevant bullet board, then post a question and get a response like RTFM. Then spend the afternoon staring into space

I was like 6 or 7 and we had this old Ohio Scientific. I think I was failing to get some really simple BASIC program to run and then started crying and my mom had me call my dad at work.

Then we also got a Color Computer 2 which I really liked following the manuals and experimenting with BASIC. That helped a lot. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://... https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...

One of my high school math teachers decided to offer a course in BASIC programming, I took it, and was hooked for life. It was in the early 80s, and I was also interested in electronics, so I devoured Byte Magazine every month -- especially Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar. My dad read an article in the Wall Street Journal, about this guy who had the audacity to sell a software app for 39 bucks, and got it for my birthday: Turbo Pascal. One of the great things about TP was the manuals, which were comprehensive yet readable. There were corresponding manuals for electronics, such as The Art of Electronics and the IC databooks.

I think things have changed in ways that will make it harder to learn programming from manuals, or from any other compact source. BASIC and Turbo Pascal had what, maybe no more than 20 keywords, and the capabilities of those packages encompassed everything that could be done on a limited platform such as MS-DOS or Apple II. Expectations were lower: A text display and menus were good enough for a lot of apps -- even successful commercial ones.

Today, I think that programming has gotten harder in some ways. The systems that we have to program, and the tools, have utterly sprawled. I don't even know all of the keywords for the languages that I use today, much less the libraries. I think we have to get used to using systems that we don't fully understand, and how to do so without creating a train wreck. That's more like how the rest of the world lives: A chemist doesn't know every possible compound, or reaction. They learn some solid foundations, and how to approach the vast space of possibilities.

Programming is now integration of large volumes of mediocre code written by others. This is only possible because we can find the problems of that code discussed online. Before that capability, there was more reluctance to reuse existing weakly supported code.

I think the biggest change for me isn't the availability of information on the internet but the decrease in cost. Pretty much any language is available for free now, when I started the only thing you got for free was a BASIC interpreter in the system ROM.

Books, online tutorials, finding solutions to some obscure problems ("connecting to SQL from Borland C++" etc) was a nightmare. For short period just before Stack Overflow, Experts Exchange and W3Schools had dominated Google results related to programming problems. Personally, I think that one of the motivations why SO was created were the shady practices of EE (how they were trying to trick visitors into paid subscription).

I would make a joke about how everybody used to read books, but before SO there were forums and before forums there were mailing lists and newsgroups.

plus Perl was king so there weren't any right answers, or an infinite number of right answers I should say.

Learning to code was mostly done by people who naturally gravitated to logic and computers and could solve problems on their own or with the help of a mentor.

I think in the 90's there was a growth in what I call career programmers: people who chose to get into programming because it was "the thing to do", though they didn't have the natural skills or passion for the work. They just worked really hard to learn and found a nitch to fit into...before moving on to management (or getting fired). A lot of these people were the foundation for classroom training and certifications.

I think millennials are a combination of natural skill and passion, but in many cases lack the background of computer science so they do great and terrible things all at once.

I'm mostly self-taught, but having Google and Stack Overflow are really amazing tools. Except when you're asking the wrong question (Google lacks context). Then you need something else, which doesn't exist. Yet.

it SUCKED. You really had to rtfm (and hope that the fm was good) or depend on google to find the right topic on a given forum (dreamincode, for ex) and hope that that topic didn't devolve into a shouting match over something that had NOTHING to do with your search query. it took much longer to get anything done.

Writing code these days is SUPER easy. Write stuff, run or compile it, get an error, search Google for said error, click on SO link, find answer, implement answer, move on with your life.

I was extremely lucky and stumbled across a particular IRC channel where some kind souls took pity on me and patiently answered my questions and gave me advice. I think it's fairly likely I wouldn't be a professional programmer today if I hadn't found that channel / those people.

For me at least, there was a certain level of aptitude I needed before I was able to productively seek out knowledge on my own. The range of possible things-to-learn in the programming world is so vast and daunting that I needed some hand-holding at the outset, until I had enough knowledge to reasonably separate things I needed/wanted to learn about from things I could confidently disregard.

If I were learning from scratch today, I think it's fairly likely I would still need something similar, even with the existence of SO.

Newsgroups and mailing lists were the thing. To me as a kid, the space felt much cozier and more intimidating.

But the technology has evolved in more ways than just stack exchange. There was the availability of compilers in general- today, it's a search and a 1 minute download to get your compiler. And pick your quirky tutorial of choice. Back in the day as a kid, it was mowing lawns and paying for boxes of disks, paying for thick books(hope you bought the right $40 book!), nobody to verbally speak with, and staring at obtuse example code for hours late night while you were supposed to be sleeping.

Good times.

I grew up in the mountains of Southern California. No mentors, nothing other than an 80386 running DOS 5.0 and QBASIC. There was a book on BASIC at the local library which became a staple of my programming education.

I strongly regret that this post most likely won't get enough votes to trigger n-gate.com to generate a summary.

I learned programming by books and the PHP .chm offline manual mostly (and trial-and error with VB6/VBA). The difficulty was and is that a book is likely to be outdated even before the printing plates are engraved.

It was bad as hell with PHP (which in turn led the PHP core developers to provide backwards-compatibility for ages), but in the JS world which evolves waaaay faster and especially believes that "backwards compatibility" is the devil I will not buy any kind of JS dev book - and also the reason why I shifted from JS frontend work to backend, server ops and security. Stuff there evolves fast (and is plagued by security considerations), too, just look at Docker - but at least you are out of the "I just reasonably understood framework X, version Y but now version Z is out and I can throw everything I learned into the bin" loop which is bound to destroy you sooner or later.

StackOverflow, in contrast, attracts a massive load of users so you're way more likely to find a working example - and usually if it's outdated you'll find someone in the comments mentioning that it's outdated and in most cases even an updated response. What I don't know, however, is if StackOverflow's success is based on the hyper-evolution in the JS scene or if the evolution would not be possible without SO - because there would be no way to distribute the knowledge fast enough.

I started with Hypercard and followed up with Borland C++ Builder. In both cases, there was a reference manual and many examples. SDKs (such as the DirectX one) also came with tutorials and sample code. I also bought a book about C++, but it was a very bad one in retrospect, as well as the OpenGL red book.

Not having access to the internet (let alone Stack Overflow) really forced you into a mindset where you were on your own, so you had to take a scientific approach to finding bugs: trying hypotheses, comparing code that worked and code that didn't, reverting changes to a known working state, and so on. I wish it had made me better at writing easily debuggable code, but I was still too young back then, so it mostly made me very good at debugging ugly code (this, and my four-year stint as a programming TA means that my most effective debugging method is staring very hard at code for a minute).

After a while, I managed to get a connection to the internet. I suddenly gained access to a lot more tutorials and online resources. I spent a little while on IRC and on the Gamedev.net forums, but by then it was a lot faster for me to solve my own problems than to post them somewhere and wait for an answer. What I needed then was to unlearn all the bad habits that came from coding on my own, and it took a while (and a few team projects). I was this kind of weird creature who knew the C++ standard by heart and could find subtle errors just by reading C++ code, but who was completely unable to work in a team where everyone wasn't a C++ language lawyer. I got better.

Well, we didn't waste as much time arguing about whether or not a question was on-topic or a duplicate of another, so we had a lot more time to just write code and practice.

i'm 46 and i began programming when i was 11. Obviously no Google or SO. There were some excellent resources even at that time, but i don't recall having legal access to the internet until i was in university (from eastern europe).

so yes, nearly always learned and traversed bugs in my code the hard way...but i don't recall it being that hard. Mostly it was just awesome.

but here's the thing: then i was coding in BASIC then C from lyceum, university, and the first few years of my professional career and most of the time i was working. While working in C for instance, i recall most of the time i got stuck it was something having to do with memory management--allocating it, reallocating it, recycling it, and re-pointing it. I got stuck, but not in a subject i didn't already know quite well.

today, it's a much different story: i'm at risk of drowning in DSLs (never called that, often "frameworks)--new ones pop up constantly and others disappear.

so when i get stuck today (or for most of the last decade) quite often it's because i need a different kind of assistance--like the kind a noob needs, because quite often i'm starting at some code from a DSL that i don't need to re-factor or debug, but that i need to interact with, and i've never seen this DSL before.

I learned to program on an Atari 130XE, which came with a manual that covered basic operation and a full ATARI BASIC reference.

As a ten-year-old armed with thousands of hours of spare time, I devoured this manual in pursuit of making games and drawing pretty pictures. I don't even really remember many details of the process; I just know that I spent a lot of time engaged in trial and error (guided by the manual, without which I would not have even tried).

Books, and subscriptions to things like the ACM (for papers to read). Before the internet I'd go to the corporate library (at Apple) and photocopy a few dozen papers to read every month. In my office I had a couple large bookcases with a few hundred textbooks. Read manuals from various manufacturers (e.g., processor references, chip docs).

(I've still got most of those books, and the papers are largely in boxes, and while many of them are kind of quaint, like the early Unix, Mac and Windows manuals, much of the material is still relevant and worth re-reading).

For learning programming: Read textbooks (e.g., K&R) and do the example exercises. Read kernel, compiler and editor source code for good examples. Find a mentor, ideally a hardass who won't let you get away with even tiny mistakes.

I was thinking earlier today that a lot of the reason why systems are so complicated these days is that we can get away with it because of resources like SO and Google, and in a sense we're creating "complexity we can't lift", but on a global scale now, and at some point this approach won't scale. You need to pretty good at searching for issues and triaging bad advice, and this is only going to get worse.

Nobody has mentioned Computer Literacy! It even has a wikipedia page.

That's where I bought huge numbers of programming and theory books in the early 90's working in SV. Better than the Stanford Bookstore. The old store even smelled nice, like a very old library. I so enjoyed spending an hour once a week or so just sampling books.

Anyway, I started out learning basic on a (borrowed) sinclair about 1980, and then learned fortran on a mainframe at GaTech. The way you were taught fortran was to be given lectures on numerical analysis, and then you implemented the algorithms using the fortran manual as a guide (no help from the class). The asocial grumpy nerd behind the counter might occasionally answer a question at 2AM. When Newton's method converged the first time... I was in heaven. We had a fabulous co-op program, and so I learned basic (again, much better) on an HP-9845. Though it was state-of-the-art hardware, the real advantage was that it had a full set of HP manuals, and I got to use it almost full time for a whole summer. And they paid me!

Then next came a PC about 1986. I spent about 15% of my total income for that machine, and never regretted it. What that enabled was a platform for Turbo Pascal, and a little later Turbo C. As others have noted, those were heavenly development environments, with outstanding documentation. I think one of the authors of the documentation was kinda famous for his literary style, but I have forgotten his name. I also in about '88 spent $600 for an 80MB HD. This was about 5% of my then income as a math grad student. Never regretted that either. All of this investment in money and effort might have been entirely wasted, but instead I got my dream job in '89.

For me, which was just before stack overflow, it was dodging and weaving through forums and getting grilled on rather it was a homework question or someone copy and pasting the forum FAQ about searching the forum, etc, before posting.

Also, one big reason I think PHP was my go-to was the easiness of the manual (http://php.net/function_name_here)

From the article:

> And finally, there was "reading code."

This is what I did. A lot. And typed-in the code (found in magazines) I didn't understand. The reading code bit is I one of the two* important skill that I don't see exercised/exhibited by a lot of folks who are learning now. Reading lots of different styles of code found in the "wild" i think helps you appreciate more the underlying concepts a lot better instead of focusing on the particular style of you language of choice

* The second is the basic concepts behind "relational algebra" which I also learned by doing using Quattro Pro 2 (long before i knew the name of it) back in the day. I'm not talking about the syntax of SQL but more the modeling of objects/tables and their relationships to each other. Knowing when things should be 1-to-1, 1-to-many or many-to-many seems to be a lost concept sometimes. </rant>)

Edit: Quattro Pro 2 is probably not right.. it was a DOS based relational database package similar in features to Microsoft Access. You designed your schema with DOS based forms but could make links and queries between forms using a foreign-key concept.

There was this horrible site called experts-exchange.com (note the hyphen) that dominated search results, but IIRC they made you pay to see the answers.

Good books were /great/. Local library had some books on Basic, VB (with a Visual Basic 5 CCE), C++ and whatnot. They may not contain the most recent 'best practices' or may even teach some antipatterns, but they get the ol' noggin' rolling and tuned for coding.

A well structured book with bite-sized chapters should be very approachable even for today's attention deficit generations.

My father bought us a TI-99/4A in 1981. The manual was quite good, and was essentially a tutorial for BASIC programming since BASIC was the OS. I got through that quickly and then just started trying stuff on my own, more and more complex.

A lot of things were simpler since there were no external libraries, no network updates, even no real choice of language. You just keep reading and experimenting and building your skills. I kept a 3-ring binder of notes, things I'd written down or photocopied from books.

My next computer was a Commodore 128. This had a better version of BASIC, more memory, and a CP/M option. You could also program directly in assembly or compile down to it, so I learned to read and write 8-bit assembly too. People are still learning new tricks with the old Commodore computers but by and large, you could still learn this machine inside-out in a way that's really impossible with today's more complicated, constantly updated systems.

After that I went to university and had both teachers and internet access, and programming has never been the same since...

I'm still learning how to programme (getting better every year); Stack Overflow is good for quickly discovering class functions I didn't know about (but would have found by drawing my finger down the class reference if I'd gone that way), and suggestions for dealing with annoying bugs or compilation failures. It all has to be carefully filtered, though; I know I really should double-check everything I read there against a more authoritative source, and examine any algorithms etc for applicability.

But that's not learning programming. That's an occasional source for a neat trick, or a function I didn't know about. I probably try SO a couple of times a week, and generally it's not to learn anything so much as to save myself five minutes digging through a reference manual. For proper learning I just sit down and grind through a book while reimplementing The Secret of Monkey Island in whatever language/style I'm trying to learn.

So for at least some of us, self-learning programming before SO was pretty much the same as now.

Sure, there was no SO/Google, and you had to rely on manuals and books. But the signal-to-noise was much lower. If you found a solution to a problem, it was nearly always The Right Solution. Today you look for something and you find 10 solutions, of which 9 are complete shit.

This is more of a factor of how tech moves fast today, but still. It wasn't impossible to write programs.

Mailing lists an newsgroups were the help centers of the day. Particularly newsgroups and services like DejaNews that let you search them.

Enormously frustrating, if you couldn't afford books. Once I got a modem, I made several breakthroughs thanks to collections of text files, the greatest of which was PCGPE, the PC Games Programmers' Encyclopedia.

(Looks as though a few people have put it online: http://qzx.com/pc-gpe/)

I hate quibbling with a question's premise, but dang, this one is whack.

SO does not teach you how to program. It gives you upvoted answers to specific questions people have.

Would you try to become a doctor by reading common questions and upvoted answers to medical issues? Of course not. Sure, after you were a doctor, such game-playing might be useful -- but only as something extra, not as the skill itself.

I was just leading a team two hours ago through some group coding, and we ran into a problem. "Let's Google it!" we all said, and sure enough, other people had the same problem.

But the top three results? They were bogus. The authors didn't understand the error, so the questions they posed were vague and out-of-context. The people answering the problem were just as bad, only some of these wrong answers to wrong questions got quite a few votes! And why not? The internet is a game you play for points.

I was fortunate that I knew the answer before we started. I was just curious to see how it played out.

It did not play out well.

You learn to program by somehow climbing inside of somebody else's head and learning to think like they do while they program There are various ways to do this: read lots of books, watch videos, spend time pairing up in a computer lab on campus. None of them involve playing hit-and-miss Q&A with the internet. Sure, it's fun, and yes, it gives you a bunch of answers to specific problems you didn't have before. But it's got jack shit to do with programming.

Remember those old haunted house games from the 90s? Where you had to thrash around until you finally came up with the magic phrase? Something like "pick up the lamp from the corner". Once you got the phrase right, you could proceed.

Lotta folks think programming is like that. It is not.

In fact, when I look at a lot of the crap that passes for programming, most of it is due to coders on a time budget thrashing around online, copying and pasting whatever they think might work. And they never come back to clean anything up.

Why refactor if your idea of programming is simply making the compiler work and something half-way acceptable appearing in the results? I'd argue that the majority, perhaps the vast majority, of people claiming to be programmers today are, in fact, people who aren't afraid of the machine and know how to Google. (And what usually happens to these folks if they are successful is that they end up in corporate jobs where they do less and less programming and become more and more afraid of breaking anything)

Mostly books from the library (or buying them, but that was fairly rare when a teen + broke), experimenting yourself and also being very fortunate to befriend some established programmers who were willing to take me under their wing.

I'm very glad that learning programming is much easier these days (especially at my job where I can just google most issues now :)).

Back in the day, we self-learned programming by buying a box of blank punch cards at the campus bookstore, waiting in line to use the keypunch machine, and then waiting in front of the printer bins for the line printer guy to roll up your output like a newspaper and deliver it. There was lots of down time for reading the manuals very carefully.

Stack Overflow wasn't around for sooo long. I remember after it first came about and everyone jumped onboard and it's hard to remember how we lived without it, but before then we had Expertsexchange and blogs from various evangelists from companies and we also had this acronym to live by RTFM... which we did, rigorously. When we didn't understand something, we pestered our professors, consulted other books, Google'd for it or jumped on IRC and asked other programmers who would always be quick to reply RTFM... until you'd been around long enough to proven yourself not to ask questions that could've easily been answered with some rudimentary reading. Before the internet though, it was all books and hacking to see what you could figure out on your own... and if you couldn't figure it out on your own, you were pretty much done.

So then StackOverflow came around and none of us have looked back since.

There was also a work-alike to StackOverflow in my pre-internet days for Turbo Pascal called 'SWAG'. It had example code snippets for all kinds of questions/problems, sorted by category.

I was surprised to find that someone made a web version out of it:

http://swag.delphidabbler.com

Does anyone else find quora to be a "fluff" Q&A site? I so much prefer the stackoverflow and friends approach.

I started coding at the age of 10 in the early 80's, using a Timex 2068.

My first source of information were the computer provided manuals, with them I got to learn Basic and overall computer architecture.

Then back on those days there were lots of books targeted to get kids to learn programming. With them I got to improve my Basic skills, learn Z80 Assembly and enjoy typing Assembly via hexdumps.

Later I started reading the Input magazine, which had code to type for all major 8 bit platforms.

At the same time I was getting MicroHobby, MicroMania and the newspaper A Capital with its computer section on Friday's.

Then when my English skills improved, Crash and Your Sinclair became part of my magazine collection.

Later I got into the PC and Amiga worlds, then I was reading Spooler, Amiga Format, PC Techniques, Dr. Dobb's Journal, The C User's Journal which became The C/C++ User's Journal, C++ Report, Microsoft Systems Journal, Game Developers Magazine. After having devoured all the programming manuals that came with all Borland products I was using.

During my GNU/Linux FOSS zealot phase I was also a regular buyer of Linux Journal and Linux Format.

Parallel to all those magazines, regular trips to the local library, getting some books when travelling to Lisbon or Porto.

Access to BBS were out of my budget back then, so I only got to access them when I got into the university.

So I started to access BBS, shortly followed by Gopher sites and USENET, before the Web got any meaningful meaning.

Also given that the university had a huge collection of CS books and research papers, all the way back to the foundations of computer science, I also got to visit it regularly.

Other than that there were the computer clubs and demoscene meetings to get to exchange knowledge between persons that shared the same interests about programming.

Barnes & Noble. That was the go to resource for programming books.

I remember back in 2001 I'd been self-taught PHP for about 3 years and was able to be productive, build some stuff that I needed built and was generally comfortable with how things worked. As far as I was concerned I "knew PHP". One day I was stuck on a problem so I actually went to B&N and bought a big PHP book because it looked like it had what I needed in it.

Sat down, found that answer and noticed something else that I didn't know. Was shocked that I'd been programming so long without knowing that thing. Ended up binge reading the entire 600 page book over the course of a week and became a better programmer for it.

Ever since, I force myself to read a book on any language I plan to actually do more than tinker with because that comprehensive information is so much more valuable.

So yea...Barnes and Noble.

Pretty good post.

The abbreviated answer, for me:

A book open on the desk, another one open on my lap. I spent a lot more time reading programming books cover to cover than I do now, and I spent a lot of time in the programming bookstores that no longer exist, like SoftPro. In fact SoftPro was sort of like dessert when I went out for lunch.

I started teaching myself HTML and CSS (and shortly after PHP) in high school, maybe around 2003 or so. At the time I had a computer in my room, but was not allowed to have internet access on it (a wise decision by my parents that I want to implement for my own children to the extent possible these days).

My method of learning was to save web pages to a USB flash drive on an internet-connected computer, and study them, or copy them, or modify them on my computer until I understood and was able to create my own documents. Learning PHP was a similar exercise, augmented by a downloaded copy of PHP's documentation manual.

Stackoverflow definitely made answering questions much quicker, but I also think that it made it so easy to quickly get things working that I lost the practice of having to understand and fix things through deep study.

I was born in Hong Kong and I lived there until I was 12 years old. Around age of 8, 9, when I was in my 3rd, 4th grade, the school installed a computer lab and we had to take compute class every year. This was around 1999, early 2000. We learned the basics of Words (we loved playing with art work) and we also played with HTML using Dreamweaver. There was no SO and Yahoo was our primary search engine at the time, but we as kids didn't know anything about search engine. So the only way we learned was sitting in class mess around, and then go home and mess around more after downloading the free trials. Later I joined the school's newspaper club (I was the founding member) and we used Dreamweaver and Words to create newsletter. I enjoyed it.

I came to America and I was surprised by the poor computer literacy here, well, at least in my middle school. That was 2003. School were using Mac (first time, I have never seen one in HK, so I thought they were really cool looking), but the teachers would just teach us how to use the outdated Mac Word (whatever it was called back, Apple's own version). I think we did learn one or two lesson of basic HTML, but that was it. Computer class in my middle school was seen as a time break for students. Nothing exciting, teacher would just walk around and check if the student followed what she typed. I also had a single technology class in 9th grade and again teacher didn't care much and we just spent our time watching YouTube (yes, that's around 2005, 2006) or playing GTA on the computer.

I never took AP Computer Science, but I was already learning to use phpBB and started to do some light programming here and there. I don't know if I ever came across SO, but I know I used to just rely on Google search and look at either forums or blog posts. The rise of SO and convenience of Google search meant I didn't have to dig so deep on my own, but I enjoy learning the crust on my own whenever possible.

I am now 25. Although I can't do front-end development, I still believe I am a lucky person having exposed to a good CS education early on.

My parents' 80286 IBM PS/2 came with MS DOS 4.0 and a manual. I worked my way through the manual, trying every command. One day I tried RESTORE. This ended poorly, since it overwrote the entire contents of the 20MB hard drive. But on the plus side, I learned how to install an operating system that day, as I installed DOS again from the floppies. Fortunately, we still kept all of our files on floppies at the time, so nothing important was lost.

At any rate, that machine also had EDLIN and BASICA, and that was the start of my programming career. I didn't have any books on BASIC, and the manual was pretty scant when it came to information about BASIC. But I did have a friend who was into BASIC, and he pointed me in the right direction a few times.

I haven't used SO that much, so it didn't change much for me. I started in 1990. Best resource was the library. University libraries were best. I learned a ton from typing in those BASIC listings in magazines. When I got a modem, I could find some harder to find info on BBSs, Prodigy, or Compuserve. That was like trying to find a needle in a haystack, though. It took like a year or two for me to find a good reference manual on VGA adapters, for example. Finding a txt file like that was like finding treasure. Now I don't have one main resource. Just Google. The main value I get from SO is debates about best practices on specific topics, e.g. stuff like "fastest way to rip a file into an array of structs in .NET".

Things got faster once a Barnes & Noble opened up in my hometown.

I would bring a notebook and pen so I could hand-copy passages out of O'Reilly books and Dr. Dobbs. Then I'd walk back home and try them out.

This was circa '90-'93. I was in middle school, and had no internet access.

You had to figure things out by yourself. It was tiresome, frustrating, but you really understood what you were doing.

There weren't as many technologies around, so you could really invest your time into one or two technologies that were the core of your competency. Spending a lot of time figuring out a problem was an investment in your career because you were certainly committed to using that technology.

Today, it seems like there is a new technology on every project. Frameworks last 2, maybe 3 years unless they hit it big. If you spend a lot of time investing in a technology that quickly loses favor, you've really wasted your time, so cut-and-paste from StackOverflow / Google now makes up the difference.

Usenet and Listservs served similar purposes. They just weren't as easy to search or as prolific. I remember spending more time posting posting questions and waiting for replies compared to now where I almost never post something new to Stack Overflow.

Learned on a C=64.

Things went a little slower back then. In some respects, I think that was better. You could find decent quality code in magazines and books to learn by. Books stayed up to date longer. I still have a copy of PC Intern that I used when I moved to the PC platform. It had a lot of really good information in it.

But, really, it was more about trying and failing than anything else. Sadly, I've even gotten away from this because it's too easy to reach out to another dev for help. I think this makes learning more superficial. But, then, with how fast everything moves now, you kind of have to pick what you want to learn in depth and just accept the superficial learning for everything else.

My career began here in the mid 80s: http://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/iGgAAOSwnHZYmiO0/s-l1600.jpg

My first two programming languages were AppleSoft Basic and 65C02 assembly language. Like the Quora answer, I learned from books. My first was the official AppleSoft Basic programming language book from Apple, then InCider, the library, Beagle Bros books, etc.

My first real job as a developer was in C and then C++. I had good college textbooks that I reference and Stroustrap's The C++ Programming Language.

But even as early as 1992 I had access to Usenet and various comp.lang.* groups.

Today, usually I get by with PluralSight videos, MSDN articles, and Google where I put the obtuse error message in and usually Stack Overflow is the first link.

Unlike the bad old days where it use to be Expertsexchange.

Easy. DejaNews was way better than Stack Overflow.

As verbose and annoying to read MSDN and Microsoft documentation in general can be, I learned a lot of visual basic and the win32 API as a kid by reading the offline documentation. If it hadn't been so verbose and annoying, I don't think I would have been able to, as once I got accustomed to it, it provided great detail -- enough that beginner-me could piece everything together and write simple games using GDI and other win32 API stuff.

I also learned Python in ~2000 or ~2001 using their offline documentation and the occasional online session (didn't have internet at home at the time, but wasn't completely offline either).

Systems were designed better and documented better back then, and changed less frequently. They had to be, because Stack Overflow didn't exist to make up for language/compiler/runtime developer shortcomings.

i just worked through books (you know the ones with animals on them) and online courses like in school. i don't think stackoverflow is a great place to learn programming, it's only good for looking up specifics.

Back in the day we had books and magazines. Computers used to come with books explaining how they worked and how to use the BASIC that came with them; there were programming books available for sale for skill levels from beginner to professional. Magazines often had program listings printed right in them; you could type them in or send away for a cassette or disk with the programs from that issue on it. There were magazines available for each specific computer type (Apple, Commodore, Tandy, etc.).

I know, I'm dating myself here, but man was it a good time to be a kid and learn how to program.

I literally wrote hand-written letters to IBM asking questions about BASIC.

Later: Borland Pascal came with a glorious full bookshelf of printed documention, and instant-access context sensitive help within the (console mode) IDE.

I used books. Then when I had web access, I used yahoo search and altavista. Then IRC, email, mailing lists, and ICQ.

I now use use books, duck duck go, IRC, email, mailing lists, Twitter, whatsapp, slack, and stack overflow.

Before SO we had usenet groups, and later forums, so you'd ask those same questions and someone would help, pretty much like SO just on a smaller scale. Also back then we actually RTFM, and manuals usually included source examples so you'd figure out from it how to do the basic stuff and then worked your way from there by trial & error. Borland's Delphi had one of the best manuals I've ever used, to the day. And it was much slower and harder to learn it (but also you'd get broader knowledge than today).

Started my programming in 1975 on a pdp using fortran 4 - used punched cards for storing and running significant programs. Used something called I* to edit binary files. A fluorescent light with "crash" in big letters on it came on from time to time. Could play a few games including moon lander and some star trek game. Then it was RTFM and only a few people were knowledgeable and the run debug cycle was slow - 1 day per iteration - errors printed out on big sheets of paper. Everything seems pretty easy after that...

When I transitioned back into programming from the arts, back in the very early 1990s, it was RTFM, Dr. Dobbs Journal, IRC, and picking the brain of every geek and "Computer Guy" that I met ('cept most of those Netware Certified guys, as that generally ended up in a disappointing exchange between a geek and a guy who got paid to maintain a proprietary network using a cookbook, who usually didn't grok much else, and, if they'd heard of linux, they pronounced it (wrongly) as "Lie-nucks".)

Books, and using your brain. I still hardly ever use Stack Overflow (never asked a question, might check out the answer if it comes up in Google results, but usually it's not very useful).

For a while I had a paid subscription to CIX (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIX), which was pretty handy at times.

It's worth noting that in the pre-web era the proliferation rate of new frameworks/languages/platforms was a lot lower, so once you had mastered a toolset you could stay relevant a lot longer than is the case today.

IRC, usenet, "view source", local DIY computer fairs (which were quite a big scene in the UK in the middle nineties) and Microsoft developer books were my route in.

ISPs also used to give you free website hosting and once I'd learnt enough playing with that, I remember doing a website for a family friend's business and ordering my first ever .com domain (from Network Solutions iirc) for something silly like $70 via fax :)

I read the source code of web pages to learn how to do HTML, then did the same with Javascript. At the time I was learning plenty of people were blogging about how to do things with computers and I couldn't afford any books so I did it all through blogs and web sites. I remember JScript help manual and Netscape documentation showing me how to do OOP with JS back in the day and that really opened the doors up for me.

Books worked great.

One thing to consider: before Stack Overflow (and the internet in general), it was harder to learn about fringe languages but it was also therefore harder for fringe languages to get the kind of business toe-hold that made learning them a financially-valuable expenditure of time.

Try to imagine Ruby on Rails getting the traction it did in the time it did in the absence of a global community that could teach itself Ruby on Rails.

I taught myself to program in Atari Basic on an Atari 800 in 1981. I still remember the book and the way it described a for loop as an Oreo cookie. I remember subscribing to Byte magazine and typing in code snippets. Later had a 1050 disk driver, Gemini 10x printer with the Ape Face interface, and a Mips 300 baud modem. It was a glorious time, the dawn of a new age. I loved it.

I was visiting a local library 2-3 times a week and took out books like "The C Language" and SICP and slowly worked my way through them. It involved a lot of tinkering plus trial and error. Learning to program was less spoon-fed compared to today's norm and needed more dedication since gathering information and its synthesis took longer and was harder.

Basically the same, except sometimes you'd accidentally click an ExpertsExchange link in Google and have to hit the back button.

I literally begged my mom to buy a couple of books for me. The Debian sysadmin bible and some mixed programming for linux book that featured bits from many languages like bash, perl, tcl.

We could just barely afford computers for myself so I am eternally grateful to my mom for working nights while I seemingly played around with Linux and scripting in my room.

NB: Stack Overflow can be a very useful resource to answer a certain limited class of problems you run into while programming. By construction, it's a poor resource to learn how to program.

So the short answer is: exactly the same way you self-learn programming now (reading good books & code, practice, and hopefully finding a good mentor or two).

Before StackOverflow you could still find your information on forums and newsgroups.

Before the Internet took off it was a much different situation. You'd read many books of course, and to fill in the missing gaps you could read magazines or talk to other people at conferences. IT conferences in those days did make much more sense than they do now, imo.

I'd hoard programming books, magazines, and articles. Now, I just rely on the internets, keeping a file of useful links.

I really miss the days of going to Barns and Nobel and browsing thru programming books for hours to learn a new technology, then buying the best of the books available. It was a different experience that is lost in today's world and it was really only a blink of an eye as far as computing eras go, but it was by far my favorite.

You had to spend many hours reading lots and lots of other people's code. You still do, but many people seem to find that distasteful. I don't know what they're bitching about because it's MUCH easier to find and read other people's code these days than it used to be, with github search and google.

Now I feel old. Stack Overflow was launched the year when I celebrated the year I moved away from professional programming into another realm!

Books were everything! Sometimes even the computer access was rare, so you better hit your books in order to get a rolling start when you get the access to one - writing code on paper!

In the Dark Old Days, there was more specialization, so you could (and were expected to) become deeply knowledgeable about a few things, e.g. Cobol programming on OS/360. The computer vendor usually supplied everything, including the OS and the one language you used, and decent manuals were expected.

Our high school got some TRS80s in 1978 (+/- 1 year) for the CS class. I wasn't taking that class, but I borrowed the TRS80 Basic manual and read it in an hour while I was supposed to be paying attention in calculus class. After that, I could just go into the CS room after school and try stuff.

In the 80s we couldn't do the "download code" part. The most interesting code was in books: K&R, Software Tools, Thinking FORTH, SICP, etc. They taught me an implicit lesson that all my code could be that polished and readable; graduating to the working world in the 90s was a shock.

I actually have quite fond memories of the documentation that came with Sun workstations around '90 - a huge amount of documentation and boxes of ring binders to put them in. Later on you even got a complete set of PostScript books for NeWS.

I learned a lot of lower level Unix programming from those Sun documents.

We had a lot of "learn x in y hours/days" books like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Hours-Sams-Teach-Yourself-6th/dp/0672...

I actually learnt a lot from the ground up from first principles, which I was lucky to had time for back in the days (like SQL and markup etc.). Unlike today, where everything has to be completed by the end of the day in agile fashion, where I hastily copy/paste from SO.

I went to the library and checked out books with code you would type in by hand, like this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Computer_Games

You probably wouldn't believe, but we used to read assembly code in books and magazines and wrote resident programs for MS-DOS, used to load custom bitmap fonts to imitate the Norton Utilities fancy UI and stuff like that. I'm an oldfag, you see.

I started in the 80's. when I was in elementary school. I taught myself BASIC by typing in programs from books (TI/99 and Apple II).

Later (mid-teens), I taught myself C doing the same thing (on an Amiga.)

I also downloaded sample code from BBSes and the early Internet (pre-WWW.)

Books would provide the general guidelines on how to do some stuff. I used a search engine (not sure if google at that time) to decipher the exceptions and it eventually would point me to some random message board. It taught me to RTFM.

When I first started in the late 90's I mostly relied on books or long form written tutorials on the internet. I don't really remember using forums much until the early '00s for programing type related questions.

Books mostly, with some good listserves.

You tended to learn more broadly rather than zeroing in on a specific task. Now you can execute a Google search after learning to "rails new" and get the precise answer, for better or worse.

I spent a lot of time on local fidonet echoes to read and discuss programming topics. Books in .txt also happened from time to time on university BBS's. That was fun, but the early internet wasn't too bad too.

Brings back memories! I wish I still had my old thoroughly worn-out copy of the Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Manual. I used to have that machine's memory map and commonly used addresses memorized.

There was a desperation for books or manuals of any kind. I remember scouring the used section at bookstores for anything of that sort. Powell's technical bookstore in Portland was like landing in Heaven.

You just hung out on IRC and mailing lists.

It was clumsier, but it worked.

I was a VC++/Windows developer ~ 2004/2005. My go-to source was MSDN articles and Dr. Dobb's and of course user-groups and IRC channels.

I initially relied on books, then around 2000 joined the small communities online that were popping up. IRC had lots of programmer areas for chatting.

primarily, we learnt by example and experiment rather than by query. to start we sought out every bit of sample code we could find in magazines, books, or usenet posts. we downloaded, printed, and read full manuals. when code failed, we tweaked every possible parameter and tested to see what changed. in a way, TDD was the (very manual) norm because it was the only option.

you want to make us feel old?

For a time before web search was good enough, there was the practice of downloading the whole mailing list archive so you could grep it.

I started early 90s and it was a much smaller world. Systems were less complex so there was less to know. Books and manuals were also better so you could read a few books and have a decent understanding from the ground up.

I also believe that until sometime in the 90s most programmers genuinely were interested in computers and didn't just do it to have a good job. So you didn't have to deal with a lot of zealots or clueless people like there are around today.

it was a lot harder.. I used to go the book stores (remember those?) with a pad and paper and copy down pieces of code that i needed, or, even worse ;) I would actually buy the book. I recently just threw away a bunch of old programming books that I bought for the same reason that I sit on Stack Overflow for half of my day.

a thriving stackoverflow is a sign of underdeveloped primary documentation

it's also a sign of a thriving developer base with lots of people interested, but i still want a moment of crankyness about basic questions of "how do I _X_ in _Y_?" where Y's documentation is crap

Pre-the internet,

It was slow, and like learning chess with your sibling.

You didn't know how much you didn't know.

Thank God for Borland's Turbo Pascal and Object Oriented Pascal manuals. Holy crap.

My anecdotes as someone who started to learn programming around 1992:

"Before Google" is probably what you really mean.

For me: Early on (age 7-14) it was how-to/text/learn-X-Y-days books + man pages and lots of playing with Batch files, GW-BASIC, QBASIC & ASM.

Later on in highschool I was lucky my school had AP programming classes (and a small C-S dept!). So that helped me move from BASIC to VBasic/C/C++. Along the way I picked up vbscript as an sysadm intern and bash playing with early desktop Linux.

When I started college, even though stackoverflow didn't exist, you could certainly now Google things, but results were often not as good and often paywalled. During this time using the same methods above + college classes I picked up: Java/Haskell/Scheme/Prolog.

Later on now firmly in the stackoverflow era I picked up C#/Perl/Go while working, but I did this more like I always had done than the "on-line academy/tutorial" ways people seem to do it now days.

My most recent languages are Go (I have been programming fulltime professionally in it since Go 0.8) and Rust (still learning), but I still have eschewed the "on-line academy/tutorial" way of learning. I guess I don't appreciate a highly curated learning path (when I used text books I tended up use them more as references when stuck or for learning theory).

Stackoverflow is of course something has a full time programmer I might use once or twice a month... but it really only shines (IMHO) for the most superficial of issues (glitches in toolchains etc), if you are going their to learn theory your mileage may vary.. all my opinion of course.

Go deeper than most people in any programming topic and see for yourself.

Ah the good ol' days of expert sex change and google cached view

Books and mailing lists.

It was a lot easier in many ways. You bought books or got training, most of which was accurate and good. Now you read random opinions and have little idea how good the advice you find is.

In terms of using Stack Overflow to help you track down a problem? The answer, of course, is found in this relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/979/

ah the good ol days. any efnet users on here?? got insane amount of help from therr

Frustrating because most searches would link to Experts Exhange - which looked like pretty much like Stack Overflow behind a paywall.

Books, trial and error.

Books.

I started teaching myself to program when I was about 10 years old in 1988. Back then I learned from books. I went through books to learn languages and to learn frameworks or big applications (like X Windows.)

As someone else said, Google was the big game changer for learning new languages or skills.

What Stack Overflow has done has made it much easier to find answers to specific problems or questions. I don't feel like you can browse SO and come away learning Swift. But if you do run into a very specific issue you can Google it and quite probably find a solution that's on SO.

Books were good. you'd get a book for a mature library or programming language, not incomplete pipe-dreams. those were the days.

While I appreciate SO, I think it is only a glorified ExpertsExchange or some other BB that were popular before SO.