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Important Notes

Use the Search Engine, Luke!​

Remember that you can use search engine to look for resources to help you in problem solving or confirming your understanding on the learning materials. You may also learn extra knowledge and skill that might not be covered in the learning materials.

You still need to be critical with your source of information from the Internet. Since almost everyone can make and publish content on the Internet, the quality of the content may be questionable and not uniformly good. For example, you may find a programming tutorial that tell you to do certain things without providing any explanation. You may also find a code snippet that might be relevant to a problem you are having but turns out the code is outdated and does not match with the latest standard in the industry. Or even worse, the code that you find might cause a security issue in your app or in the infrastructure that runs your app.

Some tips if you are getting stuck:

  • Use official documentation of {programming language, library, framework, tools} as your source of reference as much as possible. Read the README file, Wiki pages, documentation site, and code examples.
  • If the official documentation does not really help you in solving your problem, look for a possible solution to the problem you are facing via search engine such as StackOverflow, DuckDuckGo, and Google. Please be aware of the context and the recentness of a possible solution that you found through search engine.
  • Ask the right question. Your classmates or the teaching team might have experienced similar problem to yours. You can ask but be mindful and courteous. Show them what you have done regarding the problem.

Be Courteous​

Since you are in academic environment and later will be joining the professional workforce, giving acknowledgement is pretty much the norm and common sense. You give credit to the person that helped you. That is how life works normally.

If you are using a resource from the Internet, please give proper credit by mentioning the location/source and explain how that resource helped you in solving the problem. But remember, solve your own problem by writing your own solution! You need to be able to synthesise your own solution based on your own understanding. Taking other people's work/solution is considered as stealing (and plagiarism). Surely you do not want to get accused for plagiarism since it will be noted in your academic record if proven to be true.

Learn by Doing​

Programming is a skill that must be exercised. You will not get complete understanding when learning programming only by looking at code examples or reading the textbook. To gain proficiency, you have to practice. Do some experiments with the code and build stuff. By doing so, you will get experience and reinforce your understanding to the learning materials.