After reading a codinghorror article I came across this in a comment:Good programmers also figure out their best method of self-learning. I’m one of the oddballs that reads the entire manual.
That
struck me as interesting. I know I learn in what’s probably quite an
unusual way. I’d be interested to know how other people here learn.I teach myself new stuff in a very
exploratory way. For each of the new languages I’ve learned since
starting at justin.tv I’ve spent probably five or ten minutes learning
the syntax. Then I jump in and start writing a real program that needs
to be released within a week or so. I usually start by writing a “hello
world” program, and just add stuff to that until it does what I want
(of course, as I learn new tricks I frequently remove a bunch
of stuff). If the language has a REPL I use it constantly. If not, I
fake it by just printing expressions in my program, and working in a
tight loop of editing and running the program again and again to see
how the output changes.I rarely use a reference at this stage
unless it’s to achieve something concrete. For example, I find myself
googling things like “actionscript string search”, but only after
trying a couple of likely-seeming things myself (i.e. I’ll actually
just write things like trace(”foobar”.find(”bar”)) and
trace(”foobar”.index(”bar”)), etc until the compiler stops whining or I
run out of things to try).Funnily enough, after I’ve written a real program that works, and I feel like I understand the language a bit, then
I go back and read the reference books thoroughly. It doesn’t work the
other way for me - I need to have had the exploratory phase and built
up some context so that I can read the books properly (and it’s fun to
read the books at that point and remember how I “discovered” each
feature that’s discussed).
Source: YCombinator
For me, mostly through the ASSISTA system, hence its development.
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