
Tinkering vs. Reading Books - vdthatte
Hey everyone! Do you learn better when you tinker with a new tool or when you read the manual&#x2F;textbook? Why and why not? Thanks!
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sotojuan
Tinkering wins most of the time. Honestly, unless it's a completely new
concept or way of thinking (or for a lack of a better term, "academic"
concept), tinkering and building stuff will be faster and more fun.

I only read books after I've tinkered enough to think "I can build something
with X, but let's find out the best ways to do it".

There are some problems with books for X language or Y framework:

* A lot of books (especially free ones) have little to no exercises, giving you no chance to solidify your knowledge and instead copy and paste (or type along)

* People that love reading books instead of tinkering, in my experience, a) take too long to learn b) don't retain any material beyond two weeks or so because they don't do exercises (if there are any) c) think they learned the material because they have it in short term memory

The above also applies to a lot of "video courses" as well.

The only good book I've read in the past years is
[http://haskellbook.com/](http://haskellbook.com/) because it explains things
well, is well structured, and most importantly it is full of exercises.

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itamarst
1\. Skim the book in 3 or 4 hours to get idea of high level concepts and how
they relate, and where to read in more detail when I hit something I don't
understand.

2\. Start coding.

3\. Refer back to book when I get stuck, and read that section more in depth.

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TurboHaskal
Tinkering.

However I believe that 40 weekly hours are already enough time to spend in
front of a computer so reading wins most of the time.

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drakonka
My entire life "tinkering" has always won out. However, right now I am doing
the exact opposite in my attempts to learn math - working through a textbook
from cover to cover.

Math seems like a difficult thing for a beginner to "tinker" with. You can go
into Visual Studio and tinker with C#; you can open Chrome Dev Tools and
tinker with CSS; you can go to Sublime and tinker with JS or python; and you
can sit down and tinker with sketching or painting or building a wooden box.
But how do you tinker with a tool which has so many rules and concepts and no
compiler or runtime log to let you know when you've done something wrong?

So far my extent of "tinkering" with math has been completing the exercises at
the end of each textbook section and Googling answers to various equations or
examples of proofs I want to try out based on an assumption I've made from the
things I've just learned. I guess that is a form of tinkering also, but it
comes after the entire reading part.

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atmosx
My experience is different than most people apparently: Books put you on the
fast lane IMO. Of course it takes practice to master something, anything.
Books represent a form of compressed, structured knowledge that is very
difficult for someone to find on his own.

It is really nice to play around with mentos and coca-cola but without reading
something like the McMurry (Chemistry 8th/7th/6th or 9th Edition) you'll never
understand organic chemistry's basics. You might get a long way on your own if
you're Ramanujan-level, but otherwise I think you'll learn, but way more
slowly and in a possibly unstructured way.

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mbrock
There's something to be said for just reading manuals. Like, I can mess around
with Gimp and get basic stuff done, but I bet if I read a book or manual I
would pick on fundamental things that would help me really learn to master the
tool.

I like to just read man files of utilities too, even when I have no specific
need. It's like broadening my background knowledge to call on later when an
opportunity comes up.

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brudgers
Tinkering with the book open.

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wazanator
I always tinker then refer to manual/docs as I need to. Having some project
that I can keep adding to gets me to keep learning.

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csnewb
I'll read a tutorial/blog post or the official docs to quickly get up to speed
on something, and read textbooks for learning a topic in depth. The problem is
I get too caught up in reading a dense textbook but forget a lot of it because
I don't apply that knowledge. I'm trying to find a middle ground between
reading and application.

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michalpt
Tinkering (especially for programming) most of the time. I have ADHD, so it is
a bit tough for me to stay fully focused when reading as I tend to skip
paragraphs etc :)

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usgroup
That makes me think I have ADHD too . Mind you I'd imagine all of us here have
wizard level skimming abilities by now.

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michalpt
Well, the best way to know for sure is to get diagnosed :), although I believe
this problem is waaaay overdiagnosed today because of the pharmaceutical
lobby. So many people especially kids now take these unnecessary pills which
make their heads even more messy. I decided not to take this route, and
instead make an advantage from my ADD. For example hyperfocus is one of the
common traits people with ADD have ,and allows you to be extremely focused on
things you like for many hours and don’t get tired at all. On the other side
when there is something you don’t enjoy - like reading a book in this case :)
it is sometimes very hard to stay focused. In my case a diet has a big impact
as well.

