

Why Learn-by-Google is a mistake - jeffreymcmanus
http://blog.codelesson.com/why-learn-by-google-is-a-mistake/

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wccrawford
In short, it's because if you Google it, you won't pay them money for the same
info.

Okay, maybe they tried to say it's because there are so many hits, and you
can't tell good from bad if you're a novice... But you know what you learn
from Googling that you don't from them?

Telling good from bad!

Of course, you learn to program from both of them.

For me, Google is cheaper, faster, and I learn more.

~~~
jeffreymcmanus
Cheaper, sure, obviously. Faster, though? Really? And do you learn more? If
you're doing everything by yourself, how would you know for sure?

~~~
wccrawford
Because I learned Java and SQL from college classes, and BASIC (several
versions), Visual Basic, C, C++, C#, PHP, Cold Fusion, Ruby, Javascript and
more without classes. I learn things far faster if I'm the one deciding what I
need to know, than if I'm forced to go through the language at someone else's
pace and style. (And after college, I learned more about Java and SQL on my
own than I learned in the classes.)

And it's not that I would get lazy in the classes, either. I would get bored
waiting for the teacher and start messing around with things while I waited,
and then continue with the lesson when everyone caught up. (Not their fault, I
had other languages under my belt already.) I tried to do just as much
experimentation in class as I would at home.

And that was all before the internet was available to me. Now that I have the
internet, I can research questions and issues so fast that I won't even bother
asking an expert sitting beside me. It's faster and I learn more from the web.

I'm not saying this is the method for everyone, but it's so much faster and
easier for me this way that I find it hard to believe I'm a minority.

~~~
jeffreymcmanus
You may not be in a minority. The question is whether having the majority of
software engineers learning their profession in a vacuum is best for the
profession or not.

Physicians have mentors. Attorneys have mentors. Doctoral students of all
stripes have mentors. Why don't software engineers? The notion that software
engineers are all supposed to be autodidacts is very odd, I think.

