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How do you structure your self-learning?

When you are learning a new skill, how do you normally structure the process? And how effective is it?

on November 9, 2020
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    (I assume you are talking about learning a new "tech" skill, like a programming language or a something other technical)
    For me, it's mostly learning by doing. I either have an idea on my own (just today I came up with the idea to build a time tracking tool in Rust/Go. I want such a tool myself and I want to learn Rust/Go) or one of my customers (I am a freelancer) has a project for me with some technologies unknown. The following steps are almost always the same:

    • Get some basic knowledge by doing some introductory tutorials to cover topics such as "how to start a Rust program", "what are the Rust language semantics like functions, structs..."
    • Also search for "xxxxx best practices" or something like that is really helpful in getting a feel on how other people use that technology
    • and right after getting down the minimal basics, I dig into the real stuff. I know that my time tracking tool essentially needs 3 things: The program needs to track my open programs, I have to store the data somewhere and also display the data. So I google e.g. "rust linux track open programs", "rust store data persistent" (those questions are just from the top of my head). Often my first googling attempts are not very good, because I do not know the exact terminology of the technology. But after looking at the first few search results I often know how to narrow down my search to the stuff I need.

    I am quite a fast learner and have already a wide knowledge background so this technique is effective for me.

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      This is great advice. Only thing I’d add is be willing to pay the $12 for a Udemy course just because the person actually thought through the structure of the course and have all the resources more available than YouTube.

      Also, get comfortable posting on Stackoverflow. More than half the time as you type out your question stackoverflow will show you where someone has answered it already.

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    Whenever I try to learn the skill, I keep some AIM. Like currently learning sales and marketing, My Aim is to get 100 customers for my startup.

    Everything else automatically places time

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    I start from an introductory book on the topic or skill I want to learn. Or a similar resource such as the official tutorials if the topic is a programming language or a software system.

    Then I continue with more in-depth books or text-based resources.

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