Ask HN: How do you go about learning new stuff? When starting to learn something new, I often look for books, courses, guides or how-to's on the topic - on google, HN, reddit etc. - even directly asking knowledgeable people. What does the community here do in this situation to find learning resources. |
1. survey key topics that represent either basic aspects of the subject of interest that are required to understand it or have important practical uses
2. organize these key topics as a project by breaking them down into individual tasks based on interdependencies and key productivity goals (i.e., I want to be able to do something and add a skill to my technical tool belt)
3. compile a list of reading material that cover the key topics
4. while reading on each topic, write a monograph of sorts on the subject. The monograph is intended to help you track the progress, evaluate what I know and don't know, synthesize what you do know and refresh your memory (particularly useful if it's a medium/long-term project), and help understand where to guide the learning project to better reach milestones and mitigate potential shortcomings.
Step 1 and 2 are updated based on what I've covered in the monograph. The monograph is updated as I progress, and If I didn't added the monograph then it's as if I didn't covered the topic yet.
Then start reading. I also look for talks on the topic and watch and repeat them at random.
Finally I have a pretty strict schedule to do that from 6am to 8 am.
This chunk of time is for me.