Marcio Marinho

This first post won’t be about any “technical” stuff, instead, I will talk about something I’ve been hearing again, and again, and again these days.

Based on the statement above, I decided to share my experience with everybody, and sometimes learning is trick and hard. I can prove it remembering my childhood times, when I was learning how to hide a bike, indeed I can still remember that pain, every time I felt on the ground, all scratches alongside my legs and so on.

Bringing it to our professional world, the learning process is something that demand focus, time investment, money, dedication, effort and a lot of willingness. To show it I can point out the time I was beginning in Java, and I had no clue about where to start, because I was a Delphi programmer who had a lot of experience building client/server database centric applications, but how to program on a black screen ( then my old friend clipper came to my mind ). Facing this problem I decided to use the same technique I always used before that : READ BOOKS AND EXERCISE IT’S THEORY !

Books are great learning path, because they are products developed based on author’s experiences, and most part of times the person who wrote it applied some didactics to help the reader. A book has 99.9% of chance to be cheaper resource in comparison to any other learning source, and you can study it on your own pace.

The second part of learning process which I consider very important is experimentation, where we put in practice all theory we read on a book. We can run those examples, we can test it, change it, reconfigure, create our own examples, or we can even start to build that our preferred proof of concept application, such as a Point-of-sale application, CRM and so on. This part must not be skipped, because doing these exercises we’ll be able to “link” all theory ( proving that it works ) to the results.

I am confident that reading 10 pages and executing 10 lines of code won’t make you an expert in anything, but following the road map above will certainly make you progress smoothly.

Another learning characteristic is that it must be continuous, even after years working with Java I still learning, because new features are added, or I need to remember something old. To stress continuous learning process, I’d like to point out that even reading the same book 3 times in a row, it’s impossible to remember every single passage inside it, so, you must practice it, in order to fix this new knowledge.

The underlying point on this post is a push toward learning, because every day we can be a better professional than we were yesterday, we can learn something new today to be used tomorrow. This is my recipe : Read, Study, Experiment and Learn ( Continuous ).