If you want to pass, cheat. If you want to learn, research

If you want to learn, care.

Otherwise, whatever.

That's my school experience anyway. I think if you are passionate about a language the simple fact that you care about it will mean that you want to know everything about it that you can. If you're just trying to get the job done quickly, use a cheat sheet or whatever. Only the former attitude will make you a better programmer.

I've been sitting here learning rails with the highly appraised book 'agile web development with rails (v2)', and I often just don't find the information dense enough, or specific enough. Lately I've just been reading RDoc, or the code directly. I've actually found that to be more effective.

I'm surprised at home many times I actually RTFM and are amazed by functionality that I didn't think was there. It's tempting once I get the core of a language or technology under control (especially when in a rush to deliver a working application) to cut some corners and just lookup exactly what I need (and miss out on all the things I didn't know I needed).

If it's already been done, then why re-invent the wheel? Cheat to win!

Yeah I do miss really good programming books though. Haven't seen one of those in quite a while.

I'm a dead-tree fanatic, but I've also found that it's the blog entries (when available) regarding functionality that do more digging than a book (usually) has the time for.

A blog entry is strongly-targeted to the specific issue; that's why there was a blog article. While I can't cut-and-paste from a Real Book (tm) I could just as easily type in a code sample mindlessly, without any thought to how it works, why it works, or its relation to anything else.

I view this as a discipline vs. time vs. curiosity issue rather than the information source, but (as I've been told recently, quite a bit) I'm abnormal.

I try to do this as well. I also have a really strict rule about never doing copy/paste. I always type every last character into my programs. Partly because I'm ridiculously anal about not having any extraneous characters slip in, but mostly because it slows me down enough to make sure I commit everything to memory.

not really a good example. goog queries can be equally as pedantic as dead trees. i look up solutions and nowaday it's mostly blog entries but they provide greater insight than an author can with the dry subject of coding.

this isn't like punching in numbers into a calculator and not knowing what those + - * / symbols do. grepping information can be from so many references. i mean.. i don't throw out butterflies and hope their wing movement effect the disk write on my computer, i just want to make a program work.