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Digital consumption keeps me from getting better at my job
(sibervepunk.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
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Programming
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When I was learning to program in the 1990s, at university, it was easy to get good advice and learning from the printed word: both in books and on websites. I think if I had to start learning all over again, and not be in a good school, it would be very hard for me to do as well.
Today there is too much advice, too many influencers who recently learned whatever they are peddling, too much AI, too many fields of tech.
I think the best way to learn now is how many of us learned decades earlier; use a list of books that are vetted by many ( can find lists here and there, saw one in GitHub last year). And while reading the books read the documentation even if they are gaps in one’s knowledge and the docs are badly written.
I don’t think one needs recent books for many concepts and basics. The wheel has been reinvented many times in the hundreds of tech stacks in use today. And the same concepts will be easy enough to learn in newer docs once a technology and programming set of tools is invested into by the learner.
As for new software engineering ideas and architecture concepts: usually these are reiterated from earlier ideas and often marketed for profit. So older architecture books, refined by several editions, are still best.
I find that the .NET/C# documentation has great guidance for old and new concepts. There's reference docs with remarks, there's guidance and best practice recommendations, and there's examples and guided work-alongs.
Personally I've never done the examples or video or text follow-alongs. But I greatly value the concept guidance that goes beyond mere reference docs with remarks.
While it's somewhat specific to the .NET/C# ecosystem, I imagine it's valuable beyond it, and maybe a good example of how a big and significant enough project can provide more relevant and condensed information than "random tech blogs and websites" or similar.
I spent a lot of time using msdn Microsoft docs for windows and activex c++ back in the day. Faintly envious there are videos in the c# docs.
I changed tech stacks, but comments and examples are awesome to use inside docs. Usually in the php, it’s the comments in the docs that are the best help, and example code and work around can be found there.
But most php depends on the tens of thousands of projects and libraries made others: so the docs one needs is scattered in the dependencies. Some who have good docs (laravel) and some that have no docs , in which case a debugger is best way to learn.
Yeah. It's hard to do better than the classicsl books. The language structures have changed, but the core principles endure.