Do you want to lose weight to study IT yourself? Ask me how
There is an opinion that I often come across - it is impossible to study on your own, you need professionals who will lead you along this thorny path - to explain, to check, to control. I will try to refute this assertion, and for this, as is well known, it suffices to give at least one counterexample. In the history there are such examples of great autodidacts (or simply, self-taught): archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890) or the pride of Georgia — artist Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918). Yes, these people lived, studied and worked for the most part in the XIX century and were very far from the world of information technology. However, still "the most important goal of learning is to learn to learn," as Aristotle said. In this article I will share with you practical examples that allow you to effectively organize an independent educational process.
You can still study on your own. Moreover, it is quite possible to achieve high results. You will be surprised: how a person from the sphere of commercial education (I work in the training center " Network Academy LANIT ") can speak on this subject, filing the bitch on which he sits. However, let's go in order.
I am a man, my whole professional life (and this is more than 17 years) working in the field of education: I am in education and I am FOR education. And I want to share with you practical examples that allow you to effectively organize an independent educational process. These techniques are a synthesis of my personal experience. Of course, I do not pretend to be the ultimate truth. But if each of you finds at least one device for himself that he wants to use in his personal practice, I will consider my task accomplished.
')
My first advice is if you decide to educate yourself (no matter how much time you are ready to devote to it: 10 minutes, an hour, a day ...), try to avoid other things at this time to make it as effective as possible.
Hol Pashler, a professor at the University of California Psychology, said: "Even the brain of a Harvard graduate will become the brain of an eight-year-old child if you force him to do two things at the same time."
Give up multitasking when learning, and you will get the maximum effect from education.
But I promised to share practical techniques. I will illustrate these self-education techniques on the topic of front-end development. First of all, this topic is very interesting to me (from the moment when I worked as a school teacher of computer science and taught it to children). Secondly, the direction of front-end development is one of the most popular and rapidly developing areas ( see official statistics ). And thirdly, even if we are not front-end developers, we are consumers of the results of their work.
So, we need to independently acquire new knowledge and acquire practical skills. Where do you get them from? What is the source for you? Internet, textbooks and other people - right? Here we start with the Internet.
There are lots of search sites. Different search engines have different search algorithms. As a result, a different area of ​​coverage - each covers (or more technically speaking, indexes) a part of the information present on the Internet. Therefore, you need to use different search engines to get the maximum coverage of the sources.
But how to organize a search in order not to drown in a huge amount of "information noise"? We must learn to select useful grains. Yes, now search engines perceive requests in natural language. Algorithms for issuing relevant search query results are constantly being improved. Search engines acquire a huge set of additional functions. But the question “How to search for information efficiently?” Remains relevant to this day.
Almost every search engine has an advanced search and query language on which it is built. But not everyone takes advantage of this opportunity on a regular basis.
I will show on the example of Google. If I want to learn front-end development, I’m interested in technologies that I should pay attention to and resources worth reading.
You can also use special characters or words to refine your search queries. These simple tricks will help get more relevant output and save a lot of time spent searching for quality information.
Now, probably, everyone knows about MOOC - mass education available on the Internet for everyone. Among the most famous sites are Coursera , Udemy , edX , Khan Academy , Fun MOOC . Most of these resources contain courses in English, but there are Russian-speaking ones, for example, Stepik (where, by the way, Sberbank Corporate University places its courses).
In my personal charts, the undisputed leader is Udacity - for the professional approach and the involvement of experts from the industry. I also often use Coursera - they have something that other resources do not have, for example, cross-checks. This is an opportunity not only to receive comments from other users, but also to get involved in the process and act as an expert (and this is also one of the methods of self-education, and I will tell about it later).
In my personal opinion, the Russian platforms are still somewhat inferior to foreign ones in terms of the quality of the material and the form of delivery to the listener, but if you answer “Do you speak English?” To “Yes”, this is also an excellent option.
Consider the search algorithm of the desired program on the example of Udacity .
If you are a novice specialist and do not know in which sequence you need to build training, what courses to take, what tasks are worth solving, then you can write to so-called. "Comprehensive programs". Specialists in the field of education have already built the entire educational trajectory, it remains only to follow it.
How to understand which of the found courses is better? There is no universal recipe, it all depends on the goals, objectives and qualities of a particular person. However, I can give some recommendations.
By collecting these factors, you can determine for yourself whether to take this course.
Another frequent question is related to self-organization - up to the end of online courses reach a maximum of 8% of students. People are looking for solutions to specific tasks that drop learning as soon as they are found. Another reason is the duration of the course. Most people are sprinters by nature and it’s hard to run a long distance.
If you still want to complete training, first of all, develop in yourself those qualities that self-education requires:
Also, the problem of self-organization is successfully solved when regular and final reporting to management or other persons is necessary. The certification system also works, but only in cases where there is a need to confirm the status.
Look for people whose knowledge and experience you can rely on. People from the industry who have established themselves as high-class professionals who are ready to share their experience openly and free of charge. Do you think this is fantastic and this does not happen? It happens. There are a couple of tricks you can use to find such people.
Refer to official sources - for example, organizations that develop standards. They have working groups created to develop specialized content. And information about them, as a rule, is generally available.
Let's look at a specific example.
Usually experts in this field willingly share their developments. You can find recordings of their speeches, see the list of resources they used, see the slides and even the code they showed. And learn from their example.
By the way, Lea Verou, I especially recommend - she has a lot of "tasty" developments, which she puts in the public domain. She inspired by her example a huge number of people around the world. And I'm no exception.
The second way to find experts is video hosting, where you can find records of conferences devoted to the desired topic. This is YouTube or Vimeo , which is not so widely known in our country, where a lot of materials are stored, which are sometimes not on YouTube.
And again with an example:
So you can find professionals in the right field and get access to their work.
Here, my advice is very simple and even to some extent controversial in our era of “Big Brother” - leave “digital footprints”:
And on the “digital tracks” you will be given suggestions related to the topics of interest to you. This is an opportunity to enter the professional community, where you can get useful information and practical examples.
It is believed that with the availability of information on the Internet and countless online courses, reading books ceases to be relevant. However, this is fundamentally wrong.
Books are needed to get a three-dimensional view of certain concepts, ideas, problems and technologies. They broaden horizons and are designed for in-depth study of the material.
However, it is also necessary to read effectively.
For theoretical studies there are standards , regulations, etc.
If we are talking about technical literature, then I am guided by simple logic - I use the recommendations of authoritative sources. By them, I mean recognized experts from the industry (I’m signed to many on Twitter ), as well as respected electronic publications and profile portals (for example, A Book Apart , O'Reilly Media , Smashing Magazine , CSS-Tricks ).
In general, I prefer practice-oriented sources. At the same time it is very important to me:
Here are some examples of books that I definitely recommend:
“I remember only what my hands do” - this is how the principle of learning “Learning by Doing”, well-known in world pedagogical practice, can be interpreted.
Sooner or later you will need to somehow consolidate the entire accumulated knowledge base in practice. You need to constantly train - to do this, find special tools that will allow you to organize such training most effectively.
Where do these tools come from?
Relying on one of the preceding paragraphs — experts who share their working tools — you can find in their blogs and on sites where they publish their materials, interesting projects. These projects allow in practice to work out the new technologies that you are studying, methods of work, to develop your know-how. And there are a lot of them.
In animation, for example, a change in the property being animated over time is described by a certain curve, or rather, by a set of its parameters (coefficients). The most realistic, from the point of view of the viewer, animation effects proceed non-linearly in time (it’s enough just to get acquainted with the principles of animation laid by Walt Disney to make sure of this). For example, some object begins its movement gradually, then its speed increases, then it gradually begins to decrease, and so on. Mathematically, such dependencies are described using Bezier curves.
Take a look at the interactive Cubic-Bezier simulator (Bezier curve), where you can clearly see how the shape of the curve affects the character of the animation of an object moving in space. The algorithm is as follows:
More interesting examples:
I will dwell in more detail on a couple of the most significant, from my point of view.
Task: it is necessary that the form field used to enter the user's password, as possible values, take only sequences of at least 6 characters containing at least one digit, a letter (regardless of its register) and any character. The check should be carried out on the user's side by standard browser means (for this purpose, the attribute of the input field is used , the value of which is a regular expression).
Sequence of actions :
Sequencing:
The main idea is to use various tools that are freely available on the websites of specialists and allow you to hone your skills completely free of charge.
After you have filled your hand, go to a new level - you yourself become an expert.
How to do it? Easy.
Remember the bike about the teacher: “I told them three times, I already understood everything myself, but they won’t understand”? You need to translate your knowledge to consolidate it. And as a tool, I suggest using the StackOverflow service. This is a specially created resource where developers are looking for answers to their professional questions. And they are answered by the same people - the developers. So an extensive database of problems is collected, each with a solution. And you can become the author of the answers to these questions, understanding this or that topic and sharing your experience.
You kill two birds with one stone at a time: first, learn to solve this problem yourself. Secondly, learn to talk about the solution algorithm and thereby more reliably fix new knowledge in memory.
The sequence of actions at https://stackoverflow.com/
Or:
Do not forget about Stack Exchange - a network of websites for working with questions and answers in various fields, as well as the domestic resource Toaster (thanks, sfi0zy , for the tip-off).
I shared with you a few simple tricks that will help you “learn to learn” and make the process of self-education more effective:
You might think: why then do we need training centers?
I will answer:
You can still study on your own. Moreover, it is quite possible to achieve high results. You will be surprised: how a person from the sphere of commercial education (I work in the training center " Network Academy LANIT ") can speak on this subject, filing the bitch on which he sits. However, let's go in order.
I am a man, my whole professional life (and this is more than 17 years) working in the field of education: I am in education and I am FOR education. And I want to share with you practical examples that allow you to effectively organize an independent educational process. These techniques are a synthesis of my personal experience. Of course, I do not pretend to be the ultimate truth. But if each of you finds at least one device for himself that he wants to use in his personal practice, I will consider my task accomplished.
')
My first advice is if you decide to educate yourself (no matter how much time you are ready to devote to it: 10 minutes, an hour, a day ...), try to avoid other things at this time to make it as effective as possible.
Hol Pashler, a professor at the University of California Psychology, said: "Even the brain of a Harvard graduate will become the brain of an eight-year-old child if you force him to do two things at the same time."
Give up multitasking when learning, and you will get the maximum effect from education.
But I promised to share practical techniques. I will illustrate these self-education techniques on the topic of front-end development. First of all, this topic is very interesting to me (from the moment when I worked as a school teacher of computer science and taught it to children). Secondly, the direction of front-end development is one of the most popular and rapidly developing areas ( see official statistics ). And thirdly, even if we are not front-end developers, we are consumers of the results of their work.
So, we need to independently acquire new knowledge and acquire practical skills. Where do you get them from? What is the source for you? Internet, textbooks and other people - right? Here we start with the Internet.
1. Search effectively
There are lots of search sites. Different search engines have different search algorithms. As a result, a different area of ​​coverage - each covers (or more technically speaking, indexes) a part of the information present on the Internet. Therefore, you need to use different search engines to get the maximum coverage of the sources.
But how to organize a search in order not to drown in a huge amount of "information noise"? We must learn to select useful grains. Yes, now search engines perceive requests in natural language. Algorithms for issuing relevant search query results are constantly being improved. Search engines acquire a huge set of additional functions. But the question “How to search for information efficiently?” Remains relevant to this day.
Almost every search engine has an advanced search and query language on which it is built. But not everyone takes advantage of this opportunity on a regular basis.
I will show on the example of Google. If I want to learn front-end development, I’m interested in technologies that I should pay attention to and resources worth reading.
- Go to the Advanced Search page .
- Set the parameters. For example:
a. with the phrase: Front-end Development,
b. with any of the words: 2018,
c. Search in: English,
d. Country: United States
e. Update Date: Last Year
f. Word arrangement: in the page header. - Click Find.
- And on the search results page we select those resources that will serve as a starting point in the study of the topic.
You can also use special characters or words to refine your search queries. These simple tricks will help get more relevant output and save a lot of time spent searching for quality information.
2. Learn online
Now, probably, everyone knows about MOOC - mass education available on the Internet for everyone. Among the most famous sites are Coursera , Udemy , edX , Khan Academy , Fun MOOC . Most of these resources contain courses in English, but there are Russian-speaking ones, for example, Stepik (where, by the way, Sberbank Corporate University places its courses).
In my personal charts, the undisputed leader is Udacity - for the professional approach and the involvement of experts from the industry. I also often use Coursera - they have something that other resources do not have, for example, cross-checks. This is an opportunity not only to receive comments from other users, but also to get involved in the process and act as an expert (and this is also one of the methods of self-education, and I will tell about it later).
In my personal opinion, the Russian platforms are still somewhat inferior to foreign ones in terms of the quality of the material and the form of delivery to the listener, but if you answer “Do you speak English?” To “Yes”, this is also an excellent option.
Consider the search algorithm of the desired program on the example of Udacity .
- Moving to the catalog of courses - Catalog
- Choose a category: Category - Programming and Development
- Put the filter "free": Type - Free Courses
- Specify your level: Skill Level - for example, Beginner
- We refine the skills that we want to hone: Skill - HTML, CSS, JavaScript
- And we get a list of courses that you can enroll for free. Plus, the fact that most of them are developed with the participation of vendors, and training takes place on real projects.
If you are a novice specialist and do not know in which sequence you need to build training, what courses to take, what tasks are worth solving, then you can write to so-called. "Comprehensive programs". Specialists in the field of education have already built the entire educational trajectory, it remains only to follow it.
How to search for such programs
- Go to the section with advanced training programs (Nanodegree)
- Through the School of Programming we find the direction we need: Front-end Web Developer .
How to understand which of the found courses is better? There is no universal recipe, it all depends on the goals, objectives and qualities of a particular person. However, I can give some recommendations.
- Read reviews to learn the opinions of other people.
- Acquaint with the Intro course, which describes the content, structure, techniques, presented fragments by which you can assess how professional the approach to course development is, whether the teacher presents the material, what are the additional mechanisms of self-control or automatic control from the system.
By collecting these factors, you can determine for yourself whether to take this course.
Another frequent question is related to self-organization - up to the end of online courses reach a maximum of 8% of students. People are looking for solutions to specific tasks that drop learning as soon as they are found. Another reason is the duration of the course. Most people are sprinters by nature and it’s hard to run a long distance.
If you still want to complete training, first of all, develop in yourself those qualities that self-education requires:
- learn to plan time;
- find the right motive;
- Invite your friends to make you a company in training, so that it was with whom to discuss and analyze what was learned.
Also, the problem of self-organization is successfully solved when regular and final reporting to management or other persons is necessary. The certification system also works, but only in cases where there is a need to confirm the status.
3. Look for experts
Look for people whose knowledge and experience you can rely on. People from the industry who have established themselves as high-class professionals who are ready to share their experience openly and free of charge. Do you think this is fantastic and this does not happen? It happens. There are a couple of tricks you can use to find such people.
Refer to official sources - for example, organizations that develop standards. They have working groups created to develop specialized content. And information about them, as a rule, is generally available.
Let's look at a specific example.
- Go to the World Wide Web Consortium website.
- Moving to the Working Groups
- Among them, choose the one that we are currently interested in. For example, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
- We turn into the category of participants and get access to all organizations involved in the development of these standards:
- We find invited experts - experts who are recognized by the international community. Invited Experts: Rachel Andrew , Lea Verou
Usually experts in this field willingly share their developments. You can find recordings of their speeches, see the list of resources they used, see the slides and even the code they showed. And learn from their example.
By the way, Lea Verou, I especially recommend - she has a lot of "tasty" developments, which she puts in the public domain. She inspired by her example a huge number of people around the world. And I'm no exception.
The second way to find experts is video hosting, where you can find records of conferences devoted to the desired topic. This is YouTube or Vimeo , which is not so widely known in our country, where a lot of materials are stored, which are sometimes not on YouTube.
And again with an example:
- We go on YouTube. Search: frontend conference
- It also works effective search, and do not neglect them. Choose: Filters → Channels
- And we get a list of channels dedicated to this topic.
- For example: Front-Trends → Playlists → Front-Trends 2017
- Choose any speaker. Let's say, Una Kravets is an excellent expert who has a lot to learn.
- Voila
So you can find professionals in the right field and get access to their work.
4. Make artificial intelligence work for you
Here, my advice is very simple and even to some extent controversial in our era of “Big Brother” - leave “digital footprints”:
- Subscribe to the channels to offer you "similar";
- "Laykayte" and save in bookmarks videos and materials;
- Subscribe to the pages of professional communities you are interested in in social networks.
And on the “digital tracks” you will be given suggestions related to the topics of interest to you. This is an opportunity to enter the professional community, where you can get useful information and practical examples.
5. Read books
It is believed that with the availability of information on the Internet and countless online courses, reading books ceases to be relevant. However, this is fundamentally wrong.
Books are needed to get a three-dimensional view of certain concepts, ideas, problems and technologies. They broaden horizons and are designed for in-depth study of the material.
However, it is also necessary to read effectively.
How to choose books to read?
For theoretical studies there are standards , regulations, etc.
If we are talking about technical literature, then I am guided by simple logic - I use the recommendations of authoritative sources. By them, I mean recognized experts from the industry (I’m signed to many on Twitter ), as well as respected electronic publications and profile portals (for example, A Book Apart , O'Reilly Media , Smashing Magazine , CSS-Tricks ).
In general, I prefer practice-oriented sources. At the same time it is very important to me:
- so that the language of exposition is simple and humanized (I like interlocutor books, where questions are asked, a thought is disturbed in the course of reading),
- quality of rolled material. Of course, the content is more valuable. But the wrapper leads to a conclusion about the attitude that was put into the book, gives an idea of ​​the time and effort spent to give the book life, about finding the right way of self-expression of the author (and the entire sacrament team) through the book. As they say, the devil is in the details. And I really notice them.
Here are some examples of books that I definitely recommend:
- Andy clarke. Art Direction for the Web
- Lea Verou. CSS Secrets: Better Solutions to Everyday Web Design Problems
- Adam Wathan, Steve Schoger. Refactoring UI
- Heydon Pickering. Inclusive Design Patterns
6. Use different tools.
“I remember only what my hands do” - this is how the principle of learning “Learning by Doing”, well-known in world pedagogical practice, can be interpreted.
Sooner or later you will need to somehow consolidate the entire accumulated knowledge base in practice. You need to constantly train - to do this, find special tools that will allow you to organize such training most effectively.
Where do these tools come from?
Relying on one of the preceding paragraphs — experts who share their working tools — you can find in their blogs and on sites where they publish their materials, interesting projects. These projects allow in practice to work out the new technologies that you are studying, methods of work, to develop your know-how. And there are a lot of them.
In animation, for example, a change in the property being animated over time is described by a certain curve, or rather, by a set of its parameters (coefficients). The most realistic, from the point of view of the viewer, animation effects proceed non-linearly in time (it’s enough just to get acquainted with the principles of animation laid by Walt Disney to make sure of this). For example, some object begins its movement gradually, then its speed increases, then it gradually begins to decrease, and so on. Mathematically, such dependencies are described using Bezier curves.
Take a look at the interactive Cubic-Bezier simulator (Bezier curve), where you can clearly see how the shape of the curve affects the character of the animation of an object moving in space. The algorithm is as follows:
- Adjust ( leverage )
- Set animation time 1.5–2 seconds
- Running the test creates the right animation effect: there is a preparation for the start of the action, the action itself and inertia after its completion.
More interesting examples:
I will dwell in more detail on a couple of the most significant, from my point of view.
- Checking compliance with the password requirements of the RegExplained playground :
Task: it is necessary that the form field used to enter the user's password, as possible values, take only sequences of at least 6 characters containing at least one digit, a letter (regardless of its register) and any character. The check should be carried out on the user's side by standard browser means (for this purpose, the attribute of the input field is used , the value of which is a regular expression).
Sequence of actions :
- /^.{6,}$/ - any 6 characters
- /^(?=.*\d).{6,}$/ - at least one of them
- /^(?=.*= dd
- /^(?=.*\d)(?==**azaz) )((?=.*= )
- Another example is the CSS3 Patterns Gallery : it’s just amazing how the code turns into a geometric pattern!
Sequencing:
- Scale 90%
- Zig-zag - background code
The main idea is to use various tools that are freely available on the websites of specialists and allow you to hone your skills completely free of charge.
7. Become an expert
After you have filled your hand, go to a new level - you yourself become an expert.
How to do it? Easy.
Remember the bike about the teacher: “I told them three times, I already understood everything myself, but they won’t understand”? You need to translate your knowledge to consolidate it. And as a tool, I suggest using the StackOverflow service. This is a specially created resource where developers are looking for answers to their professional questions. And they are answered by the same people - the developers. So an extensive database of problems is collected, each with a solution. And you can become the author of the answers to these questions, understanding this or that topic and sharing your experience.
You kill two birds with one stone at a time: first, learn to solve this problem yourself. Secondly, learn to talk about the solution algorithm and thereby more reliably fix new knowledge in memory.
The sequence of actions at https://stackoverflow.com/
- In the search field we drive in a query - for example: CSS
- As a result, we have the issuance of all the issues with the tag "CSS"
- Go to the Unanswered tab. And we get a wide field for activity
Or:
- https://ru.stackoverflow.com/
- Tags
- We act according to the same scenario.
Do not forget about Stack Exchange - a network of websites for working with questions and answers in various fields, as well as the domestic resource Toaster (thanks, sfi0zy , for the tip-off).
Results
I shared with you a few simple tricks that will help you “learn to learn” and make the process of self-education more effective:
- Search effectively.
- Learn from massive online courses (and complete them).
- Look for experts from whom you could borrow experience, with whom you can talk and consult.
- Use the power of artificial intelligence: leave "digital footprints" to work for you, expanding your professional circle and horizons.
- Read books. Just come to their choice consciously. Those whose authors ask you questions and stimulate your thinking work will be most suitable. Do not forget about the aesthetic component: reading should deliver not only intellectual pleasure.
- Practice using various tools that can be found by experts. And do not be afraid to experiment.
- Finally, become an expert yourself in order to put the accumulated knowledge into practice.
You might think: why then do we need training centers?
I will answer:
There are job openings at the Network Academy!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/458708/
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