Try X in Y minutes

My favorite way to learn is through practice. In fact, it's the only type of learning that helps me internalize the material. That's why I'm a big fan of Learn X in Y minutes, which teaches programming languages by showing the code (with comments).

The only thing that bothered me was the setup step. Sometimes I'd prefer to try something new quickly, without downloading and installing a bunch of stuff. So an ideal solution for me would be to try the code in the browser without any setup. Like this:

# Define a function named `greet`.
# Arguments are passed implicitly and
# are available in variables $1, $2, ...
greet() {
    echo "Hello, $1!"
}

# Call the function with a single argument:
greet "World"

Hello, World!

Fortunately, I had all the tools I needed to implement this vision. So I did it.

Try X in Y minutes is an interactive version of Learn X in Y minutes, where you can run (and modify) the code in your browser. And not just programming languages — databases, libraries and CLI tools too.

Try C in Y minutes — Read the explanations, play with the code.

Of course, making all the original guides interactive is a huge undertaking. I've prepared a few, but that's just a start. There is no way that I could do it all alone in any reasonable amount of time. So I invite you to join! Try X in Y minutes is completely open-source, and your contributions are very welcome.

Here are the currently available guides:

Languages: Bash • SQL • C • Odin • Expr
Databases: PostgreSQL • FerretDB • chDB
Network: Curl • Caddy
Other: Mermaid • Rough.js • Scikit-learn • SQLGlot

Let's Try X in Y minutes!

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