

Ask HN: what can I learn in a week that can greatly improve my work or life? - eli5

I have, what I hope, an unusual and possibly beneficial question for anyone here and, hopefully, I can get as many different answers as possible.<p>I was wondering, what interesting technology, language or tool can I learn in a week or so by reading a book and&#x2F;or practicing. Something that has a potential to greatly improve my productivity or maybe just my understanding of how things work, or maybe even my life. Anything.<p>To give you a number of subjects I&#x27;m already familiar with, so you don&#x27;t suggest them: Rails, Javascript, html&#x2F;css (you can imagine the stack), also quite good with Linux and its tools, using Vim.
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logn
Regular expressions. If you want an in-depth book try _Mastering Regular
Expressions_ by Friedl. Or for a quick guide, [http://regular-
expressions.info](http://regular-expressions.info) along with
[http://rubular.com/](http://rubular.com/)

Regex will not only give you new skills for programming (no more splitting
strings in weird ways and doing complex indexOf/substr operations), it will
help you day-to-day in rummaging through file systems and your code.

And if you already know regex, then I'd recommend Map Reduce Streaming. The
Streaming variety is all based on standard in/out and very straight forward.
Amazaon Elastic Map-Reduce could be a nice way to test things.

~~~
eli5
Ahh, already read it long long time ago. Great advice though!

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dclara
Currently, I'm running a free summer camp online to help college students to
learn the professional skills as a software engineer according to the
industrial standard.

There are various options you can pick and choose to be hands-on. The "main
dishes" is to help you run through a process from installation, configuration
and deploy a real world web application with the full server stack.

Check it out if you have time. It is described in a Kickstarter project: "How
to build a website like an engineer"
[http://kck.st/SY4CXv](http://kck.st/SY4CXv).

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ScottWhigham
Without more info about what your work or life are about, it's hard to suggest
something too specific. Since we're being generic, I'd say that it's hard to
beat the value of learning how relational databases work. Focus on learning
the basics of SELECT - that takes months but you can get the rudimentary parts
down in a week. If you already know the basics, then look into index design.
Why/when/how and all that.

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axit
Faster touch typing? If you're not already great at this you can improve
productivity by improving your typing speed.

You can learn and practice on sites like
[http://ratatype.com/](http://ratatype.com/) and
[http://typeracer.com/](http://typeracer.com/)

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lettergram
Personally I found Emacs greatly improved my productivity. First week was
hell, but now I'm more productive than most people I know in my office.

You don't realize how much time you save by never having to life your hand
from the keyboard.

~~~
eli5
You do realize I listed Vim as one of the things I'm familiar with?

On a serious note, maybe I should learn Emacs at some point. Just to be sure
I'm still in love with Vim.

~~~
lettergram
I used Vim previously, I went through a month of Vim and a month of Emacs. I
settled on Emacs in part because I enjoyed writing in Elisp

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RollAHardSix
Cooking.

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adam-_-
Cooking.

~~~
bolaft
I came here to say this. The importance of good food is severly
underestimated. If you improve the quality of the food you eat, you improve
your life. Also, you can save lots of money. And it's a great skill to have,
socially. Being a good cook also makes you more attractive to members of the
opposite sex, regardless of gender (that's not even a joke).

