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Comment by aj7 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 ")

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