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Good 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 abo
by einhverfr 15y ago
Good 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.
- HeyImAlex 15y agoI can't speak for the person you're responding to but for me; ~400 pages of content, if it's dense I assume a pace of about 30 pages per hour, so about 14 hours of reading, maybe three hours of review total on top of that. If you're learning math concepts invest an hour or two of practice for every hour read. If it's more light reading or less foundational I can do a bit less than page a minute. This week I trudged through EffectiveUI pretty mindlessly (a lot of O'Reilly books are very wordy and soft) in about six hours.