Effective Internet Searching

Ada Build - Learning at Ada - Lesson 1

Learning Goals

By the end of this lesson you should be able to

Know where to go for answers
Evaluate a source as likely to have the answer you are looking for (or not)
Narrow your search results to yield better results
Find answers to a question on your own

Overview

Software developers do not have all of the answers. Instead, a good portion of their time is spent searching the internet and references for the answers. Common tools that developers use include StackOverflow and Google. What’s most important is that you can find the answer, not that you know the answer right away.

Activities

Read How to become a programmer, or the art of Googling well
Watch How Search Works
Read 20 Tips to Google Search Efficiently
Try AGoogleADay.com, a daily search challenge from Google

Techniques

Type using keywords instead of full sentences
Add ‘example’ to your query if you want to see an example
Add the specific language you are coding in to your query, e.g. ‘python’
Use double quotations when you need an exact match in your search
Make sure to check the date of what you are referencing, languages often change over time

Applications - Searching For Errors

Often when you are confronted with an error message, for example:

>>> 
>>> names = ("Ada", "Grace", "Katherine")
>>> names[3] = "Paula"
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'tuple' object does not support item assignment
>>> 

You can select the error message: TypeError: 'tuple' object does not support item assignment and enter it into Google.

This will bring you to a number of questions online where people have encountered the same question earlier. Then you can evaluate the source of each article. StackOverflow is a likely source of similar questions, Quora is a bit less likely, and InterviewCake usually has to do with interview topics rather than the exact error message and how to stop it.

Narrowing It Down Further

You can further narrow down results to a problem like the above by putting the error message in quotes and adding pertinent keywords to the search, such as “Python”. So the search term "TypeError: 'tuple' object does not support item assignment" Python is likely to narrow things down quite a bit.

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