What is your favorite way to learn a new language, product, or tool?
For me, I prefer hands-on, with nearly all self discovery and as little guidance (written or instructor-led) as possible.
This helps me understand if something will be intuitive for me (and therefore I can budget a smaller amount of time or non-focused time) or if I need to dedicate a significant amount of focused time and energy, or even find instructor-led or curated options for learning.
How do you learn? Or maybe the better question, how do you prefer to learn?
Oldest comments (27)
I just like to build stuff. When I get stuck I look it up and keep going. Fastest way to learn new things in my opinion
Build stuff while reading documentation
I attack it by four different angles who will hopefully converge
If there is a course or tutorial with title "Learning {tech} in 6 hours", it's totally normal if you're not finishing it in 6 hours.
Just spend the first hour or the first section, not more than 1 hour. Then spend about a day or even a week to build something with everything you know from the first hour of tutorial if possible. This can be a small project that you can save in cloud drive, github gist, note, etc.
Continue the next hour of tutorial with the same step. The bigger the project you build, to may need to store it into git repository.
Yes! This is so critical for anyone at any level. Sometimes this is equivalent to a buzzword for SEO and other times it's a bad estimate from someone who may already have knowledge or experience in the areas covered.
I love how you broke it down. This is great advice!
For me, I prefer to start off by finding a good starting point, whether it being a detailed video tutorials or going through the documentation.
Then, I find it very useful to start building stuff and identify which points I need to go back to and read more about.
Depends on what I am learning
Your tool examples are great. Unity is huge and has entire university courses dedicated to only parts of the functionality.
Postman is my favorite experience and I'm glad you highlighted it here. You can get it to work quite easily by working through the UI. Want more powerful features and functionality? If the UI isn't guiding you, they have great content built by people at Postman and the community.
... long time ...
Technology became obsolete, return to 1. 😁
But usually most dev tech has some kind of examples on their website that I look at. From that I can usually gauge whether I can implement it in a project or not and if it's better than the current tech that I'm using or not. When it's better I either try to implement it into an existing hobby project or start a new one. Along the way i use google/stack overflow to solve any issues i run into. If i can't find solutions immediately, it goes on the backlog as "non mature tech".
Relatable on so many levels 🤣
Go for written tutorials rather than video tutorials.
That way we get to learn a lot more by exploring related things. But in case of videos, we just follow what is being done there and we only get a high level understanding.
A well written step by step guide/ tutorial is better than video tutorials.
Also, we get a clear understanding when doing hands on with written tutorials.
I really like written tutorials more than videos too. I find myself having to pause videos almost constantly because they go too fast if I'm trying to learn something for the first time.
Only if the written tutorial clearly explain all steps. There are many written tutorials with unclear steps because of our little knowing of the background.
So, written tutorials for pace and video tutorials for clarity.
I do learn while doing. I do absorb 20-30% from a course or any source and then go for implementation. And then I go for 50% and I do until 80-90%.
Then I do work on Good Projects and I do share all my learnings on lovepreet.hashnode.dev/
learning by doing takes longer than just going through a book or course, but the material sticks longer and better that way. a lesson you learned by overcoming a problem is always more treasured than something you merely read.
i also take the effort to type out samples, rather than just pasting them. transcribing makes you focus on the content and structure, not just the results.
Typing things out is such a good mechanism! Get your fingers working through the flow of things.