Learning Curve

I really enjoy learning new things.  I often miss the good old days of attending classes at the university, and even now I would still love to go back and take more classes just for the sake of broadening my knowledge. If only I could avoid taking exams and the astronomical cost of tuition. So it appears that for now I am stuck learning things on my own and attending the occasional seminar/webinar when possible.

The challenge with learning things on your own is discovering where the good knowledge is.  In some cases there may be dozens of books pertaining to a certain subject and determining which one to invest your time in is a challenge.  In other cases there may be very little information available and when just finding the information is a challenge it is hard to be picky about the quality.  There is no mentor telling you what you really need to know, and the material may not be presented in the most organized manner (though I can’t honestly say that not all of my university courses met that criteria!).

In my latest endeavor, I had to start from the ground up.  Learning a new language, using new hardware, minimal public documentation/tutorials (but that is steadily getting better) etc.  I wasn’t doing this just for the sake of learning something new, I actually had a few projects in mind that I wanted to accomplish.  I’d say that the learning curve has been a little more than I expected, and it is always frustrating to know enough to know that if you knew what you were doing already you could accomplish your task in a fraction of the time.  I’m going to stick with it though, because the more I do the more sense it makes, and I’m almost done with my first project (don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll announce it here when it’s done).  It isn’t as flashy as I would like and doesn’t have all the features I had planned, but those will fit nicely in the next version.  For now I’m just looking forward to my next project!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 10:51 am and is filed under Code, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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