This is a thing I have grappled with for a while. How do you learn something?
I think that acquiring skills is a process of taking in new information and using or transforming it into something else
That is why "projects" are such an important part of learning. That is why many tutorials focused on game development are focused on building a specific type of game instead of learning the tools broadly.
But say you are given a comprehensive resource. A resource that covers every aspect of a piece of software. Maybe a textbook or manual or a 30 hour course.
How do you take all that information and use it in a useful way?
You could make your own project but I think this question is putting the cart before the horse.
Maybe it is more valuable to create the project first and use the resource to fufill it.
That is what I am aiming to do with this blog.
Before you search for resources search in your mind for a project. What do you want to make?
Right now my project is this website! I hope that my HTML and CSS skills improve and that will be reflected in future blog posts which are more stylized, organized and more meaningful.
For the sake of this experiment I am trying to use resources that act more like textbooks or manuals then tutorials.
My main resources will be:
I know there is some arguements against using w3schools b ut I have learnt using it before and its pretty good. I think all the html I have used here I have recalled from the last time I was learning HTML using w3schools. I do wanna try using the MDN docs as I have been recommended it as a more reliable resource.
So how do you use this to actually learn something?
The value of a project is it acts as your north star while learning. That way then you learn something like how to make a header in HTML its not in a contextless void, it is in a living growing project.
This is the process that I think works the best:
I think two ideas fuel this thinking.
The first is that learning a skill is actually getting good at a bunch of smaller skills that build up your ability to preform the main skill. Theres only so good you can be at riding a bike if you don't learn how to balance on it
The second is this idea from Atomic Habits. If you get 1% better at something every day, you will be exponentially better by the end of the year.
This is my plan to help move my skills forward. After I become good enough at this website thing or if I get bored of it I think I will continue to make blog posts about other fields of interest. Even if they are as barebones and unstylized as this.
Thank you for reading my little blog post! I hope to be writing more.