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Comment by oceanghost | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to give away the secret of autodidactic learning here. I developed this technique in college. Although there was no such thing as YouTube back then, iTunes etc.

I get at least two, preferably three data sources on the same subject. Read them all in Parallel and take notes. Getting multiple perspectives is critical.

What works for me is two well-made textbooks and a Youtube series, iTunes university, etc course.

““In almost all textbooks, even the best, this principle is presented so that it is impossible to understand.” (K. Jacobi, Lectures on Dynamics, 1842-1843). I have not chosen to break with tradition.”

–V. I. Arnold, Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics [5], footnote, p. 246

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Exactly how I aced high school. And got into MIT. Much less useful to me in college. Even less useful now. I must have 100 programming books in Google drive.

The only way to learn something (and certainly programming) at a high level is to force yourself to write down a well- defined, closed-end problem, and then sit down and solve the motherf_____r. You learn what you need to learn, build, and invent along the way, and that survives longer than the original problem.

Right. I think learning this way forces yourself to solve the problem by teaching the discipline to yourself. It's always said that you don't truly understand something until you are able to teach it to another so in that sense you a sort of "tricking" yourself into teaching it to yourself as you learn it. It's a round about way of thinking / doing things but those mental gymnastics feel necessary to me to absorb such unnatural and abstract (to me) topics.

>The only way to learn something (and certainly programming) at a high level is to force yourself to write down a well- defined, closed-end problem, and then sit down and solve the motherf_____r. You learn what you need to learn, build, and invent along the way, and that survives longer than the original problem.

This is how I've been successful as a self-taught developer.

I tried this technique with C++ but soon I realized it was a dead end. You try to build anything with C++ without some inner understanding of concepts like const, templates and STL, and I can bet things will blow up pretty fast.

This is how I learned most of my mathematics before highschool. I just made up a problem such as calculating the angle which minimizes the time to intercept a slowing rocket which taught me a lot about differentiation.

However, I didn't become amazingly successful in life.

I Agree. You learn so much more when you are focused on solving that problem.

Can you tell which ones? ("100 programming books in drive ")

+1 for multiple sources. I've yet to find a single source that is clear and understandable across the board. Switch between sources when a topic seems to be unusually difficult to understand. Then go back to your original, favorite source.

Note that I do not think this applies to books that simply showcase and act as a more advanced reference of programming languages. Those are normally plain enough, I think.

For others subjects, like math or CS, multiple sources have always proven invaluable for me.

It's a tough choice to follow sometimes. I know very very well that different perspective makes a world of difference (one book left me dry for 10 years, another unlocked me in a week). But it's hard sometimes to keep progress on many fronts.

I still second your system. Makes me wanna try.

Can attest.

Learning a music instrument right now, and a combination of youtube, guitar instruction books, and earing music off my music player seems to be the strategy that makes the most gains. That and spaced repetition (5 1-hour practices sessions is better than 1 5-hour practice session)

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