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Stop reading this blog and learn something

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Re: Stop reading this blog and learn something

#21

Post by barry-cotter »

gruseom wrote: post #16
SkyMarshal wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Books are also the result of much more time and effort spent thinking about, planning, and evolving the content, structure, presentation. A book-length collection of blog posts just won't have the attention to detail and completeness that most books do. I also believe books improve one's ability to concentrate, which directly benefits a programmer's ability to get into and stay in flow. Whereas blog posts are…

How do you find the support for pdfs?

I can't speak for him but on the smallest (7''?) Kindle reading abstracts is a bit of a pain, reading single column per page is fine but double column is annoying enough I'm considering getting reading glasses or a magnifying glass. (I'm 27) I meant to email amazon to find out if you can dismiss the progress bar because with some pdfs it obscures the bottom line which is annoying as all hell. Still highly recommended.

Edit: 10'' would almost certainly be fine. The zoom doesn't really fix the problems with double column pdfs either.

Re: Stop reading this blog and learn something

#22

Post by billpatrianakos »

I just had to go through this and was forced to learn these tips myself recently. Before I discovered HN I was a PHP guy. I knew it. Used it. Was comfortable with it. Then I came lurking around here and found out that I wasn't cool because I didn't know Ruby and therefore Rails. Then I found out that I wasn't cool because I was using Apache instead of Nginx or nodejs. So I read about all that stuff for most of this year, played with getting Ruby to spit out arrays in reverse and organize them in different ways, got a VPS and installed Nginx and then at the end realized that all I got from it was an Nginx server serving up a static unfinished website in HTML and the knowledge of how to play with arrays in Ruby (and just in irb, not even in a web page!).

The moral of the story is that reading is useless without action. It's easy to fall into analysis paralysis even if you're decently experienced.

I've come to almost despise the hipsters (and that word is so apt for describing them) who are too cool to do things the standard, time tested way. It's one thing to go bleeding edge for the sake of experimentation and furthering your knowledge and skill but when you're off using some esoteric language or framework or whatever just to be different or cool then that's really... Well... Lame for lack of a better word. Like wearing some ridiculous outfit "to be different" and claiming its just fashion that the rest of us are too uncool to get.

I eventually did get out of that unproductive cycle by the way. I am learning Rails but I've put more of my energies into actually producing things that work using uncool but very useful languages, practices, and frameworks. Sometimes the cool kids are wrong. It's more important to get something produced and working well than it is to use some hip technology because the cool kids claim its better. Ive found that a lot of these claims of some tech stack being better either all boil down to some very narrow use case or give you some benefit that's really negligible in the grand scheme of things. Take it with a grain of salt. Read a bit but don't get hung up on the hype. Make something.

Re: Stop reading this blog and learn something

#24

Post by cosmez »

Jun8 wrote: post #13

Simple: Phase I: Print this out, have it framed (with non-gloss glass) and hang it on the wall where you can easily see while you code. Phase II: A day will come when, while reading this, you will chuckle to yourself and mutter, "I, too, was like that". Then remove it from the wall and pass it on to another noob. I'm still in Phase I, but have become conscious of this, which is an indication that I may be moving, alb…

The first step is to admit you have a problem, hallelujah my friend!!

Re: Stop reading this blog and learn something

#25

Post by billpatrianakos »

avdi wrote: post #19
systemizer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, you have to careful about reading books on technology. It is very possible that the technology has changed since the book was published. There are some technologies I would read books for and some technologies that I would read the online documentation and blogs.

There is definitely such a thing as a book that was released too early.

I disagree. All books are released too early if you think about it. The technology will change rapidly no matter when you buy the book so it's up to the buyer to make sure it's the latest release for the version they'll be working with if a version applies.

Let's take nodejs for example. I think it's safe to say that it's new enough to be considered too early to publish if there were such a thing. Even if node changes drastically within the next few months any book about any technology that's worth anything at all (did I say anything enough times? Haha) will teach you the fundamentals about how to get it, set it up, configure it how you want, and get you going with some reproduce able examples. That's really all you need. No book can be expectd to cover every last bit of the technology in great detail. I'd argue that most people learning to program get the fundamentals from the books and maybe some bonus knowledge and the rest we pick up with experience and research.

Then you have remember that there's a good bit of time between the writing of the book and it's publishing and then some more time between editions. No book can be current. But it doesn't matter because of why we buy the books to begin with. We learn the ropes from them. Even books about advanced techniques teach you enough about a technology so that in a case where the advanced technique is out of date you can still get what you want done by inferring how you're supposed to do things now based on other data from the book combined with experience and practice. So given all this, I don't think there's a such thing as being released too early and in fact believe all books are released too late. But they're valuable nonetheless.

Re: Stop reading this blog and learn something

#26

Post by jamesbritt »

rams wrote: post #10
raganwald wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As has been noted repeatedly: “To Mock a Mockingbird” by Raymond Smullyan. It’s one of the finest mathematics/logic books ever written for the intelligent layman. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0192801422?ie=UTF8&tag=... (Yes, that’s an affiliate code. Strip it out and replace with your favourite charity. “Raganwald" is an acceptable answer for “favourite charity.”)

Seems to be out of print on Amazon. Most sellers don't ship to foreign countries. Tough luck for people like me.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0192801422/ref=tmm_pa...

Some of these places say they ship from the UK, some ship from the USA. One ships from Germany. Does this help?

Re: Stop reading this blog and learn something

#27

Post by Arxiss »

Jun8 wrote: post #13

Simple: Phase I: Print this out, have it framed (with non-gloss glass) and hang it on the wall where you can easily see while you code. Phase II: A day will come when, while reading this, you will chuckle to yourself and mutter, "I, too, was like that". Then remove it from the wall and pass it on to another noob. I'm still in Phase I, but have become conscious of this, which is an indication that I may be moving, alb…

Seems interesting. But what should I print-out?

Your paragraph or something else?

Re: Stop reading this blog and learn something

#28

Post by cjfont »

artursapek wrote: post #7

I don't know why he pushed you should learn "the popular one" so hard, unless he meant that ironically. There's no way to choose the most popular language from PHP, Ruby, and Python. I do agree on books vs. blogs though. When I started learning Python as my first real language this summer the best source I ended up learning from was LPTHW[1] (I used the free online edition). I think a book like that is a good tool fo…

As I was reading his post, I was thinking that the perfect example of the sort of technology his methodology would apply to right now is the recent explosion of Javascript MVC frameworks: Backbone, Spine, Ember, etc. Using his approach, Backbone would be the obvious choice to start off with.

Re: Stop reading this blog and learn something

#29

Post by avdi »

cjfont wrote: post #28
artursapek wrote: post #7

I don't know why he pushed you should learn "the popular one" so hard, unless he meant that ironically. There's no way to choose the most popular language from PHP, Ruby, and Python. I do agree on books vs. blogs though. When I started learning Python as my first real language this summer the best source I ended up learning from was LPTHW[1] (I used the free online edition). I think a book like that is a good tool fo…

As I was reading his post, I was thinking that the perfect example of the sort of technology his methodology would apply to right now is the recent explosion of Javascript MVC frameworks: Backbone, Spine, Ember, etc. Using his approach, Backbone would be the obvious choice to start off with.

...I also used that as an example below the main example :-) And I have come to the same conclusion as you re: Backbone.

Re: Stop reading this blog and learn something

#30

Post by alinajaf »

billpatrianakos wrote: post #22

I just had to go through this and was forced to learn these tips myself recently. Before I discovered HN I was a PHP guy. I knew it. Used it. Was comfortable with it. Then I came lurking around here and found out that I wasn't cool because I didn't know Ruby and therefore Rails. Then I found out that I wasn't cool because I was using Apache instead of Nginx or nodejs. So I read about all that stuff for most of this y…

> I've come to almost despise the hipsters

Can you give me a concrete example of one of these hipsters? I'd like to know because I work at a company where we use rails and related tech exclusively, so we'd probably fit right into this camp.

> who are too cool to do things the standard, time tested way. It's one thing to go bleeding edge for the sake of experimentation and furthering your knowledge and skill but when you're off using some esoteric language or framework or whatever just to be different or cool then that's really... Well... Lame for lack of a better word.

If you're happy with PHP, use PHP. If you don't like PHP and want to learn something else, then learn something else. But no one builds or uses anything just "to be different", they use it because it helps them produce working code quicker.

> Like wearing some ridiculous outfit "to be different" and claiming its just fashion that the rest of us are too uncool to get.

The hipsters that you refer to don't think you're too uncool to get it. In fact they don't think anything about you at all. They're too busy making things.

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