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>Instead of trying to do Deliberate Practice, I’d fool myself into thinking I was investing my time wisely by reading blog posts and examples but not actually d
by billswift 15y ago
>Instead of trying to do Deliberate Practice, I’d fool myself into thinking I was investing my time wisely by reading blog posts and examples but not actually doing much of anything.
That is one reason for serious learning I use textbooks. The book itself helps structure your learning, it is easy to keep track of how much you have covered, and commitment is simpler, since you can just commit to finishing the book.
It doesn't help as much though for longer term learning; I have a tendency to procrastinate between books, and often switch directions and even fields of study. On the other hand, the OP's "learning list" doesn't help much with that either.
- swanson 15y agoThat's a good point about textbooks. Do you find that if a book includes Exercises at the end of each chapter that you actually do them? That's been a big challenge for me - so many great books have 'Action' sections but I rarely find myself putting down the book and doing them.
- jrockway 15y agoI am willing to do exercises if the answer is in the back of the book. Programming Pearls did a good job in this respect.
- biesnecker 15y agoThis is a problem I frequently have. A while ago I decided to try to read through the whole book, and then go through and do the exercises. When I actually did it it worked _really_ well, but I found myself not being honest with myself and skimping on the review.
- billswift 15y agoThat depends on whether I am reading for information or actually trying to learn technique. If you are trying to learn to actually do something, you need to get practice somehow. My list of things I want to learn eventually is divided into two parts - things I want to learn about and things I want to learn to do.
- einhverfr 15y agoGood point on textbooks. I would add to that a couple other things: 1) There are a lot of development-related things that I simply want cursory knowledge about right now. Blog posts, textbooks, and the like are great there. The way I go about things is to maintain a list of books to buy and buy them on a FIFO basis. Typically there is about a year lag between when a book goes onto the list and when it comes off and is purchased. I then work through the book read it, etc. Go on to the next. The book then goes up on my reference shelf and I can go back to it when I need to. The second group of things I need to learn I have strong knowledge in a related area and really need to work with someone to solve a particular problem. Niche areas of accounting (I maintain accounting software) is a good example of this. I bring myself up to a "conversational" level of knowledge, then work with a customer's accountant to make sure everything is implemented right. But keep in mind I read about 100 textbooks a year and only a small minority are on IT. Most are hobbies (archaeology, linguistics, history, anthropology, and the like are big topics). It is easy to work an approach like this in.
- wahnfrieden 15y agoWhat's your process for consuming a textbook in 3-4 days?
- einhverfr 15y ago2-4 hrs per night, spreading several related textbooks out with other topics in between.
- wahnfrieden 15y agoHow do you consume a textbook in 6-12 hours?
- einhverfr 15y agoIt is different for my hobby areas, where a lot of the textbooks are history, archaeology, and anthropology-related and relatively short (200-300 pages). The fact that there are occasional 500-600 page textbooks that take me a week or two are not a problem. Hmmm on reviewing the books I have read, it seems my original list included some things that should not have been there. A quick assessment of ratios suggests I should drop it to 70-75 per year.