Re:Poll: How do you learn new technologies?
by billpaetzke on Tuesday June 25, 2013 @12:49AM
(#5937593)
> I find someone to pay me to build something using it.
Sounds good to me. Where do you look for this person? And how do you sell yourself developing in a tech in which you have no experience?
Re:Poll: How do you learn new technologies?
by vinceguidry on Tuesday June 25, 2013 @08:05AM
(#5938805)
Current employers, freelance clients. I don't sell myself on the basis of what frameworks I know, I sell myself based on my accomplishments. When I do get a project, I'll always work in something I want to learn. Selling on my accomplishments tends to give me the leeway to make these kinds of choices on the stack being used.
I wish I could learn a tech from a book, but the signal-to-noise ratio is generally too low in the vast majority of books I see. I don't need a bunch of "recipes" or a disgustingly short bash rundown in a book on Ubuntu, I need clear, server-oriented insight into how the OS internals work, and what went into the underlying design decisions.
Every book on a programming language I pick up spends 90% of the time on basic stuff you could pick up in a few hours with the same language's "getting started" page. I'd love a teardown of the source code with commentary on the intentions of the language designer. I don't want a gentle introduction, that's just a waste of my time. I've already introduced myself with a dozen or so hours of playing around and reading docs. But the people that could write useful things about technologies generally aren't. Or maybe I'm just not looking hard enough.