Studying and learning from books

[theplastickid]

A question I just wanted to put out there for anyone who learns web design from books.

How do you study the books you read? Do you…

Follow along from front to back working the examples
Read front to back without actually doing the examples
Read front to back and then go back and try the examples you want or all of them
Just dip in and out
Any other methods of study…

Be interesting to see how different people use books to help learn.

[jamygolden]

The only web related book I’ve read is “Digging into WordPress”. I knew most of what it talked about and I just added the things that were new to me to the back of my mind. That way I knew what was possible and which way it should be done and I’d reference the book when I needed to do that in practice.

Other than that I find practical examples help a lot. My webdev blog and helping people on these forums have taught me so much.

[fectio1]

agreed! jamy_za just helped me out.. Cheers!

[theplastickid]

I completly agree jamy_za practical examples help the most.

[theplastickid]

What about books on programming where the goal is to learn the syntax of a language

[jamygolden]

I’ve never read a book to learn new syntax. I have recently started learning Ruby. How I’ve gone about it is to come up with an idea, like… I want to create a function that would capitalize the first letter of a word that comes after a fullstop. As you can see, this isn’t functional or anything, but I know I’ll learn a lot in the process. I know how I would go about this in JS and PHP, so I pretty much try and do the same thing in Ruby.
This would force me to learn how to use the Ruby regex, some kind of replace function, capitalize first letter function. I could also split up the string into an array of characters. Target each fullstop, go to the next letter character and capitalize that.

Anyway, my point is I come up with random ideas to do as examlpes and knowledge of other programming languages helps quite a bit since you just need to find an equivalent function ( usually ) in another language. I learn a lot this way and I’d come up with a more complex example once I’m done.

I have no idea what the best method of learning a new language is, this is just how I do it.

[JohnMotylJr]

My text books are a lot of theory (programming) and yet its easy to understand the logic, examples are the best. When i am learning something new ( members login systems for example in asp.net ) i will read each chapter about twice over, second time to pick up what i zoned out the first time to. Find the practical examples and just follow along.

I am a visual learner and i have a disability so learning and concentrating is extremely hard for me. So i tend to put the books down after some levels of frustration and go to youtube. I tend to just look to see how controls are being used and than from there i go off and manipulate code myself.

Books are great but the other way to learn is just do it, do it, and……do it.

Good luck!

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