Based on How to learn new programming languages and frameworks quickly
This is an interesting discussion on Hacker News for a process to learn new things quickly. Here are some of the top answers summarized.
- For a new programming language, there are a couple of standard things you should try to implement.
Write several programs where you
- Read/write to a file
- Turn a structured object into JSON
- Parse JSON into an object
- A basic script that can be run from the CLI, parses flags/args, reads stdin
- Send a HTTP request
- Implement a very basic web server
- When you’re doing these exercises, do not copy/paste any code. You should be typing out the code yourself.
- Try to bias towards reading (blogs, documentation, code, books, etc.) over watching video tutorials. Reading is a lot faster than watching video and you can be far more efficient with your time.
- A 3 step process for learning new frameworks is to divide it up into a week’s work (10 - 15 hour total commitment)
- Prepare - Spend 1 hour Monday through Thursday reading documentation, books, and watching content. This way you’ll have time to sleep on the concepts.
- Plan - On Friday, spend 1 hour preparing a small project idea for the weekend that will use all the concepts you learned over the week.
- Project - Spend 4 - 6 hours building the project over the weekend.