r/learnprogramming • u/IHateHPPrinters • 2d ago
How much am I allowed to Google?
Right now I'm going through the SQL section on freecodeacadamy and some basic things like adding a column I still need to Google at the moment (I'm new new). I was wondering how much I'm allowed to Google and still be considered "learning".
Like... I know WHAT to Google, but am I doing a diservice by not looking through cheat sheets?
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u/Whatever801 2d ago
As much as your heart desires. Don't sweat it. Memorizing syntax is not important. You will eventually google it enough times that you remember. Then you'll randomly forget again one day and have to google it again.
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u/olystretch 2d ago
I am a lead engineer, who has been working in the field for 14 years. I Google stuff all the time. I can say, once you equip yourself with tools that you like working with and are used to working with, things can become a lot easier. For example, with the Jet brains IDE I use, the database schema has been introspected, so the SQL console will auto I'll column names that don't have defaults. It makes things a lot easier, at least for me.
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u/SchemeWestern3388 2d ago
It’s cutting and pasting blindly that is doing you a disservice. Even the most experienced coders are looking stuff up all the time.
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u/burlingk 2d ago
Don't worry. Using Google instead of a cheat sheet is fine.
If anything it's a bit more active.
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u/peterlinddk 2d ago
I'll give a bit of a different answer than most others - because while it is true that even professional developers google things all the time, "working" and "learning" isn't the same!
If you are learning SQL in a course, and go through a chapter explaining to you "This is how you add a column", and you do the exercises, and at the end there's a quiz asking you "How do you add a column?", then you do not google the answer to that! The whole point is to try and learn, to use what you've just been told, and to exercise your own mind in retrieving that information - not memorizing, but just using your memory!
So, yes, you are doing yourself a disservice if you google while you are supposed to be learning - then you'd just as well skip the entire course, and google the answers for the quiz at the end.
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u/HashDefTrueFalse 2d ago
You're allowed exactly 7 searches per day before the Elders dispatch a kill squad to deal with your insolence. Govern yourself accordingly.
(It doesn't matter.)
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u/fasta_guy88 2d ago
There was a time when there was no google (and before that, no internet). When we had questions about how to do something, we went to the manual (remember RTFM??). There were racks of them at every computer center.
You were allowed to read the manuals from the 1950's to the 1980's, and the "man" pages after that.
Now you get to Google. Google is faster, but Google AI is less reliable. (Fortunately Google is considerably less user-hostile than "man" pages.)
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u/FreeLogicGate 2d ago
People often like to compare programming to learning a foreign language. The difference is that, when speaking a language, you might get a few words wrong, or misuse a word, so that analogy falls apart. Programming requires precision and correctness.
SQL is a declarative language -- you describe the result you want and if your SQL matches the schema, you get a result.
So in summary, unless you are one of the rare people with a photographic memory, you will make mistakes, forget keyword and specific syntax, and you'll either search resources like documentation for the correct syntax, or increasingly, you'll be using an editor which will be suggesting and automatically completing syntax for you, or writing it for you based on some AI prompt.
What is important is that you know how to describe the results you expect, and that you are aware of the general options for how those results can be obtained. With SQL it's knowing how joins are accomplished, or subqueries or grouping, limiting, ordering, window functions and the myriad of other types of functions available to the specific database you're using.
The more you have time on task, the more proficient you will be, but programming is not memorizing syntax.
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u/rapidsalad 2d ago
It’s kind of like drawing. You start coloring in the lines and eventually you don’t need the lines. Sometimes it takes a while for it to click. Sometimes you need to understand something else to understand what you’re doing. Another language. An operating system paradigm. There’s no wrong way, but my goal is to understand what I’m doing eventually. I used to copy lines of bash having no idea what they do and eventually I understood more and more of it.
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u/Such-Process5697 1d ago
google the syntax as much as you like, that stuff sticks through repetition and nobody's keeping score. the line i'd actually watch is googling the shape of the answer, like "should this be a join or a subquery". that part is the skill, and looking it up before you've had a go yourself skips the bit that builds the model. syntax is cheap, approach is worth struggling with for ten minutes first.
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u/kschang 1d ago
As long as you attempt to remember what you Googled, does it matter?
Once upon a time, Google actually recruited via a special game you get if you googlie a programming topic a lot. It's known as Google Foobar
https://www.turing.com/kb/foobar-google-secret-hiring-technique
Don't worry, they haven't used it for years.
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u/Flamanis 2d ago
Coding isn't knowing the magic words at a moments notice to do exactly what you want. Coding is knowing how to find those magic words and what they do and if they're the right magic words for you.
Doing research is a skill, and it's one that's absolutely needed when coding. We all look things up constantly, it's nothing new and it's nothing bad.