When you learn a new technology...

When you (read a book to) learn new technology, what do you do?

Book? What's one of those?

Uusally I'm thinking 'I need to find out how to...' so read that bit of a book. Then put it down, it gathers dust for a while until I need to learn something else from it.

Reading a book from start to end isn't normal. Newspapers are meant to be read from the end to the start, and long novels are meant to be read from start to about half way through then you think 'another 700 pages of this?' then you bin it.

The only books that are meant to be read from start to end are invariably ones with popup bits and are about dogs called spot.

Honest!

Yo. Maybe that's why I take so long - because I read every word in the books! I don't skip anything. BUT, that is changing. I am now simply copying and pasting code, doing a lot more hands-on experiment as I go, so that I can figure out the stuff from experience, not from reading.

You find that you start scanning books for the relevent information, and you start applying that to all books. Eventually you read fiction books by garnering the essential info, and loosely following the text while filling in the plot where you skimmed over it.

The second one, I like to learn (and have learnt everything this way) by experimenting with what I need to do. The only book I started on was a PHP book when I first started read till chapter 7 or so and stoped because I wasn't learning anything from it, so went stright to what I needed and learnt that way.

dear lord... you just described me...


Be it Delphi
C++
Or php
i find that learning basics of language but then jumpign to functiosn and comands as you need them works best
Oh i need to figure otu how to connect to my database
OOOH need to learn soem OOP syntaxs

Hmm how did that stack work again

Jump around works good

Nah,
i read the book and then completely memorize it
That way i spend hours reading and learning stuff I already know or stuff that is completely useless. Then, when someone asks me a question about something I red, I can bore them utterly to death by reciting useless stuff and follow them through the building, yelling even more useless info at them, as they try to escape me.

I'd like to take the time to go through things from the beginning, as I currently have a tenuous grasp of a few languages but am not really good at any. However, time constraints and job demands usually end up dictating that I just skip to what I need, thus continuing to have only sketchy knowlege.

I read the book, cover to cover. Although I do skim over some sections, like "How to use this book" and "What is a variable". SKIM, not skip, since the latter will often have some information on how the language uses variables differently then other languages.

If it's something totally new, then I read the book and maybe skim certain sections like dog135 said...

---John Holmes...

I normally download tutorials from Devhsed or somewhere else, print them out and then read through them breifly. Then grab examples, modify and hack away at it and see how it works and then change it so it does what I want.