php|architect - May 2013 by php|architect

Author:php|architect
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: php|architect
Published: 2013-05-27T04:00:00+00:00

Requirements:

PHP: 5.3.0+

Learning How to Learn

by Joel Clermont

As developers, we are constantly faced with new things to learn. New versions of languages, new tooling, new best practices, and so on. How do you cope with it all? In this article, I’ll get a bit “meta” and talk about learning how to learn. We like our code to be efficient, so why shouldn’t our learning be efficient as well?

My first computer was an Atari 130XE. This was the era of 8-bit computers that used a TV as the display and had no permanent storage built in. Since it was made by Atari, it had a cartridge slot, and you could play games on it. Despite that, the real appeal to me was when I would turn it on with no cartridge inserted, and I would be greeted by nothing more than a flashing prompt. In my mind, there was unlimited potential behind that prompt and its BASIC interpreter.

My parents were not computer programmers. I don’t even think they were computer users at the time, so I was on my own to learn Atari BASIC and later 6502 assembler. Unlike computers today, this Atari came with fairly comprehensive manuals. A good portion of the manuals was devoted to programming. I probably read those manuals at least a dozen times.

Looking back on those early years, I now realize that this was the start of a lifelong journey of self-motivated learning. It didn’t stop with BASIC and assembler. I went on to learn VB, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Erlang, and the list goes on. Even today, I have a fairly deep stack of languages, tools, and techniques that I plan on learning, not at a university or a training course, but on my own.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.