- Professional programmers use Google regularly
- Learning how to search, read, and apply online help is a key skill
- Ask students for something they want to search
- Demo searching for an answer
- Highlighting points below
Tips
Search
- Get the vocabulary right
- Avoid extra words
- Specify the language
Results
Help sites
- Read the question
- Look at the setup
- Check the age
- Check the top 2-3 answers
- Glance at the comments
- Test & modify the example
- But don’t blindly paste things you don’t understand
- Reputation can help - e.g., StackOverflow w/lots of positive votes
Blog posts
- Read the question
- Look at the setup
- Use
Find
Documentation
- Use
Find
- Focus on the examples
Testing and modifying answers
- Test the example
- Modify the example
- But be careful
- Malicious code examples exist
- Do you trust the site
- Does it have a lot of upvotes
- Top of searches with lots of hits