Tinkering vs. Reading Books
Hey everyone! Do you learn better when you tinker with a new tool or when you read the manual/textbook? Why and why not? Thanks!
I only read books after I've tinkered enough to think "I can build something with X, but let's find out the best ways to do it".
There are some problems with books for X language or Y framework:
* A lot of books (especially free ones) have little to no exercises, giving you no chance to solidify your knowledge and instead copy and paste (or type along)
* People that love reading books instead of tinkering, in my experience, a) take too long to learn b) don't retain any material beyond two weeks or so because they don't do exercises (if there are any) c) think they learned the material because they have it in short term memory
The above also applies to a lot of "video courses" as well.
The only good book I've read in the past years is http://haskellbook.com/ because it explains things well, is well structured, and most importantly it is full of exercises.
2. Start coding.
3. Refer back to book when I get stuck, and read that section more in depth.
However I believe that 40 weekly hours are already enough time to spend in front of a computer so reading wins most of the time.
Math seems like a difficult thing for a beginner to "tinker" with. You can go into Visual Studio and tinker with C#; you can open Chrome Dev Tools and tinker with CSS; you can go to Sublime and tinker with JS or python; and you can sit down and tinker with sketching or painting or building a wooden box. But how do you tinker with a tool which has so many rules and concepts and no compiler or runtime log to let you know when you've done something wrong?
So far my extent of "tinkering" with math has been completing the exercises at the end of each textbook section and Googling answers to various equations or examples of proofs I want to try out based on an assumption I've made from the things I've just learned. I guess that is a form of tinkering also, but it comes after the entire reading part.
It is really nice to play around with mentos and coca-cola but without reading something like the McMurry (Chemistry 8th/7th/6th or 9th Edition) you'll never understand organic chemistry's basics. You might get a long way on your own if you're Ramanujan-level, but otherwise I think you'll learn, but way more slowly and in a possibly unstructured way.
I like to just read man files of utilities too, even when I have no specific need. It's like broadening my background knowledge to call on later when an opportunity comes up.