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How to Learn Stuff Quickly

joshwcomeau.com

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Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly

#51

Post by heurisko »

I greatly prefer books over videos when it comes to learning programming topics.

I'm always disappointed when I am directed to a video, rather than text, when I'm searching for a particular topic.

It takes a long time to seek to what you want, and you're forced to learn at the speed of the presenter, rather than your own speed, as with text.

I also find it easier to learn things offline. I had to get up and running with the Spring Framework quickly, and what worked was putting the documentation onto the Kindle.

Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly

#53

Post by [deleted] »

emmaLe wrote: post #30
alexashka wrote: post #8

What a strange article. First, there is no need to put pressure on yourself to learn 'quickly' - that's counter productive. Second, you need to find a good teacher. Finding good teachers is how you learn 'quickly'. Now the way to do that is to have parents who can help you. Really, the way to learn 'quickly', is to be born into a family that's loving and competent at life. Then it just happens - by the time you devel…

The internet raised me and I've learned everything from it. I agree with you on the first point. If you wish to actually learn, you take your time. As for everything else... maybe you should keep out of the """psychology""" section of the library for a while.

[deleted]

Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly

#54

Post by buckwheatone »

Barrin92 wrote: post #13
thundergolfer wrote: post #3

Overall a pretty good summary of how to teach yourself new skills. I personally went far too much into unguided learning early in my software journey. I took on personal projects that were far too ambitious and floundered with problems that would have been 10x easier if I'd focused on grasping fundamentals. What's missing in this post is that it entirely focused in isolated learning, away from tutors and other forms…

+1 for a mentor. Everyone who has ever learned an instrument knows the value of a good personal teacher. Slightly odd personal recent example, a friend who is really good at speedrunning Super Mario 64 taught me for a few hours and I got better at it in an hour than I did in the three days before trying to learn on my own.

Finding a mentor isn't the easiest process, though. I'm a very motivated self-taught developer but there's a giant gap that could be filled by someone with more experience. It's frustrating when I post more nuanced questions on forums and get zero response.

From what I gather, there are two approaches: (1) post in forums and develop a relationship over time (this can take forever), or (2) pay for an inorganic relationship through codementor or some other service and hope that it turns into a more organic mentor/mentee relationship over time. Neither is ideal.

Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly

#56

Post by TheCoelacanth »

BarryMilo wrote: post #11
Jensson wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to balance having an expert and not having an expert around. Having an expert around to quickly learn the basics is great, but you will never reach the same level as that expert without learning how to learn on your own. This is the key difference between people at higher levels, there are no experts that can teach you there so it all depends on how good you are at self learning.

What do you mean "higher levels"? Is there some forbidden knowledge that must not be written down? Because if not, all levels have experts who can teach you.

The experts exist, but can you get access to them?

Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly

#57

Post by omegalulw »

shahinghasemi wrote: post #22

I have created a learning framework for myself to learn literally anything. First of all It’s not going to be easy to get started learning something new because there are many holes in your mental model about the material and the aim of the learning is to fill those holes. We’re living in an information era. You can drawn yourself in surfing the web/docs/articles if you are some kind of perfectionism to convince your…

> You should spend about 30-40% of your time learning the material and 60-70% of your time applying it

+1. This is so common that there's a name for the algorithm that searches a space this way: IDA*!

Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly

#58

Post by throwoutway »

Barrin92 wrote: post #13
thundergolfer wrote: post #3

Overall a pretty good summary of how to teach yourself new skills. I personally went far too much into unguided learning early in my software journey. I took on personal projects that were far too ambitious and floundered with problems that would have been 10x easier if I'd focused on grasping fundamentals. What's missing in this post is that it entirely focused in isolated learning, away from tutors and other forms…

+1 for a mentor. Everyone who has ever learned an instrument knows the value of a good personal teacher. Slightly odd personal recent example, a friend who is really good at speedrunning Super Mario 64 taught me for a few hours and I got better at it in an hour than I did in the three days before trying to learn on my own.

For me it was chess & weightlifting. A few hours with a mentor can help tremendously

Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly

#59

Post by gompertz »

My latest way of learning a new programing language quickly is to actually understand how to read and navigate the API/Documentation properly, followed by learning compiler/interpreter error messages and what they mean. Understanding the syntax sorts itself out through sitting down and commencing coding something... It's not something I will directly study in a book.

Re: How to Learn Stuff Quickly

#60

Post by eBombzor »

akersten wrote: post #14

So-called programming "tutorials" have never sat right with me. The idea is fundamentally wrong. It's like trying to learn painting by watching a series of videos in which you're taught which parts of canvas to paint what exact hue to recreate famous works of art, instead of being taught how to mix paints, negative space, and color theory. "I'm stuck in tutorial hell, I understand the tutorials for how to multiply 3…

Disagree. You view programming as an art, okay that's fine, but most of the time it's not an art. You want to know how to do something one way and then if you really care about what you're building, you research better ways of doing things and from understanding why certain ways are better you start building the blocks of the underlying concepts.

Building blocks from the ground up is great for schools, but is incredibly time consuming for learning the breadth of a tool.

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