[thelist] how did you learn?

Wesley Mason wes at pmason.karoo.co.uk
Tue Jun 29 07:44:58 CDT 2004


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I'm 20 now and in the second year of "3 years at university", but I've 
been actively doing web devel and design for about 6 years now, and the 
way I started was the much more traditional route of hacking.
Grab an existing and freely available (OSS) copy of something basic 
that you're interested in, and hack it bits until it does something 
closer to what you want.
Continue this with other products.
Grab some tutorials with snippets and pop the snippets together to 
achieve something you want to do.
When you start seeing the patterns, read the documentation for the bits 
you want.
Do this for long enough you can get to the point where you pick up a 
book on the topic at hand to read the relevant bits as you know or at 
least understand the rest.

It's not a complete "how to" method, but it's a good rough guide to 
getting started, and it's worked for me in many fields of computing; I 
just prefer the "hack it" method to learning, I'd rather rip something 
apart and learn how it works, *then* move onto the docs and learn the 
abstracted or technical intricacies from the engineering/design side of 
things.

- --
Wesley Aaron Mason
(1st Vamp)
Weblog from nowhere: http://1stvamp.org/
Webcomic from somewhere: http://gfbowl.com/
Public PGP/GPG Key: http://1stvamp.org/stuff/pgp


On Jun 29, 2004, at 6:40 am, Paul Bennett wrote:

> OK, I have a question for all those developers out there who
> didn't spend 3 years at university / college to gain
> professional web development skills.
>
> How did you first begin your learning? Did you pick up a book?
> Go to online forums? Ask a friend? Take a short course?
>
> The reason I ask is that I am considering developing a training
> product and want to see if it is at least viable before sinking
> countless hours into it :)
>
> I took the 'short course' option, although it was 9 months and a
> bit more focussed on sys admin stuff than I needed. (I still
> have dreaded memories about setting up and configuring NT
> server)
>
> Feel free to answer off-list if you like.
>
> Many thanks,
> Paul Bennett
>
>
>
> 		
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