

Learning: the Hacker Way - Nemmie
http://jclaes.blogspot.com/2012/03/learning-hacker-way.html

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intenex
Much better than the alternative (all consumption, zero production), but still
not quite ideal in my personal experience. A two-phase approach is better -
first comes the dead-zone, which is getting from boot-camp to the front-line.
Sad as it is, you can't just jump straight into everything. I tried that when
I first started learning to code, and I hit the same experience as you with JS
- constant fallback on StackOverflow. Extremely frustrating since progress was
unnecessarily slow and I didn't understand the fundamental philosophies behind
the coding process and structure.

My current approach which is presently proving fantastic (we'll see where it
goes) is to 1. bust through the dead-zone with brute force (I nicknamed it the
dead-zone because it's precisely that for me - I can't get passionate enough
to crank through it without imposing a strict regimen of study because it's
not a project I can own and challenge myself with) and 2. get to working on a
concrete personal/work project asap. Once I'm on the project I become
obsessive and learn rapidly how all the pieces fit together - but that initial
phase of consumption is invaluable for broad grasp of the subject at hand and
understanding how all the pieces integrate into a whole.

That said, the ideal circumstance is that you're able to produce piecemeal as
you progress through the initial consumption phase as well - Learn Python the
Hard Way is a great example that's worked very well personally as an intro to
Python, precisely because of its piecemeal hands-on approach. The Django Book
tutorial is a nice counterexample - had to rush through that one so I could
begin a project and incorporate what I'd learned before I forgot it as there
were significantly fewer opportunities for incremental imprinting of acquired
knowledge. It wasn't a bad experience, as I did manage to get through it in
time before I lost the majority of what I'd learn, but that kind of
consumptive material is severely limited by time - if you find yourself forced
to consume something like that, get through it as _fast_ as you can and start
producing whenever you feel your knowledge slipping away.

TL;DR Consume a bit as fast as you can then produce

