learning curve
one problem with blogging is when i'm trying to do something, and have a thought, i either have to open notepad and write it down or log in and post it. i'm trying to learn visual c++ now and was going through a tutorial when a thought recurred. we are limited in our learning always by the what we already know. before you stand up and start shouting that a new born babe does not know anything but still ends up into you and me, let me finish, read this through okay?
hmm, so as i was saying, the first step to learning, assimiliating information and knowledge in general, is communication. the process starts as soon as you are born, agreed, a child is without knowledge per se, that's the reason it's learning proceeds gradually, from monosyllables to small sentences and then, eventually to, rants. when i first started learning object oriented programming with c++ (both were almost synonymous for me at that time), words like object, class, method etc were only freshly introduced so the meaning i took back from a sentence was unclear till i actually started writing my code and things started making sense. as in any kind of jargon, words have layers of meaning and nuances that you get as you keep working in the field. as you gain experience, the amount of time required to learn newer things in the same field becomes that much easier. if a C programmer decides to start learning visual c++ today, not having any idea of what object oriented programming is, he will have a much more difficult time absorbing the concepts than a c++ programmer like myself. the learning curve from c to java is much more steep than it is from c++ to java. perhaps this is the reason it is so much more difficult to start in a fairly complex technical field much later in life, a longer time to understand new concepts leads to frustration and a gradual giving up on the effort.
i could never quite understand the real reason for xml, not until had i actually started using tags for organizing data for personal use did i really appreciate the conceptual motivation behind that standard. once i knew where the potential to use xml lay, i breezed through the tutorial on w3schools. that brings up another point, often, it is easier and quicker to gain a new skill or learn an arcane technology merely by the fact that something we are already pursuing necessiates that technology's use. i prefer web pages to be simple html but i've lately found great use for css in making my webpages look better and to give an overall uniformity to my webpages. with a fairly large number of pages on my geocities website and the poetry section needing to be customized, i used ideas from the bulletin board i'd installed in my netfirms account, and figured out ways to give the page a better look. hmm, that's it.
posted by ubaid - Saturday, April 05, 2003 at 10:41 PM - 0 comments - post anonymously