The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books
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Re: The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books
#2Books present information in various ways. Some books have questions that you can answer yourself to teach yourself how to do things. It looks like this author would be a fan of Learn C the Hard way by Zed Shaw. But, if you are buying a book to learn how to do something coming in with some kind of goal is more instructive than reading a book and regurgitating the answers. The author has a good idea on how to make the tutorials in a book into questions but at the end of the day you will teach yourself only what it is in the book.
Re: The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books
#3If you enjoyed the Franklin quote in this article, check out his autobiography. It is a gold mine of "life hacks", demonstrated via accounts of Franklin's remarkable life. It seems to be one of the original American self-help books :)
Re: The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books
#4TL;DR Read book. Practice without cheating.
Re: The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books
#5This guy is nuts. Basically every article I look at I wind up reading multiple times and get new information each time. If I had the attention span to keep reading them I would probably keep learning too...
Re: The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books
#6If you enjoyed the Franklin quote in this article, check out his autobiography. It is a gold mine of "life hacks", demonstrated via accounts of Franklin's remarkable life. It seems to be one of the original American self-help books :)
What are some other life hacks you found enjoyable from the book?
Re: The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books
#7If you enjoyed the Franklin quote in this article, check out his autobiography. It is a gold mine of "life hacks", demonstrated via accounts of Franklin's remarkable life. It seems to be one of the original American self-help books :)
Gutenberg link, for the lazy http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/148
Re: The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books
#8Books present information in various ways. Some books have questions that you can answer yourself to teach yourself how to do things. It looks like this author would be a fan of Learn C the Hard way by Zed Shaw. But, if you are buying a book to learn how to do something coming in with some kind of goal is more instructive than reading a book and regurgitating the answers. The author has a good idea on how to make the…
Heretic. Kernighan and Ritchie is the one true gospel.
Re: The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books
#9He doesn't really mention that the reason chess players and musicians can take more with each glance at a position/page is that they see in chunks, not individual elements - that comes from learning the patterns, e.g. in chess "short-castled white king with pawn on h3", in music "C7 chord with melody on the 7th" etc. It's just like adding more layers to a neural network, each layer building things from the elements of the previous one. Or like us reading a page of writing - we don't have to look at each letter like a beginner reader, and barely at some individual words. I guess looking at a C for-loop is like that for someone who's seen 1000s. Apparently chess masters don't look at more positions and moves than a beginner; they just see so much more, and intuitively only look at the best moves in a position (mostly anyway).
Learning to improvise jazz seems different to Franklin's method, in that you don't listen to a jazz great's solo, put it aside and later try to reconstruct it; you have to play it exactly, writing it out if necessary, and play it over and over until it starts to become intuitive; until the muscles learn it. And that must be done with many different solos. And copying just one person just makes you a clone of them. I guess learning programming doesn't have that essential element of imitating the styles of individual great programmers, although maybe for some people it does.
Re: The Benjamin Franklin method for learning more from programming books
#10If you enjoyed the Franklin quote in this article, check out his autobiography. It is a gold mine of "life hacks", demonstrated via accounts of Franklin's remarkable life. It seems to be one of the original American self-help books :)
Gutenberg link, for the lazy http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/148
Standardebooks link for the lazy, and discerning:
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/benjamin-franklin/the-auto...