There is an abundance of information and tutorials out there to help any aspiring developer/designer learn from scratch how to do the things they want to learn to do. Heck, here’s a lot of information out there to help you discover WHAT it is you want to learn to do 🙂 . And the best things about it is that most of it is free and easily accessible to anyone with an internet connection. What this means is that it is easy to assume that all one needs to embark on learning enough to build a career as a developer/designer/programmer is three things:
- Internet access
- The ability to use Google
- Time
- The will and discipline to learn
Gone are the days when you couldn’t really learn much of substance without going to school for a couple of years at least, paying tuition, buying huge volumes of books, and paying for expensive tools and software. Today, you almost never even need to buy a book, or so it seems. With numerous blogs and tutorial sites (written and video) out there, it seems like a simple matter to pick up all the skills you need, use free tools, and build yourself a career. In addition, most of the tools you will ever need to get started are free/open source, whether it’s compilers, IDE’s, etc.
As with everything else though, we need to put on our thinking hats and critically consider the pros and cons of this amazing accessibility that we have to knowledge.
Continue reading “Strengths and Pitfalls of Online Tutorials for Beginners (Developers/Programmers)”
In this post I’m going to go a little off track and talk about non-web stuff 🙂 I recently decided to take my old IBM Thinkpad T43 and wipe it clean so I could test the Windows 7 RC OS on it. I have only now started playing with it and testing it. The first challenge I have faced so far is getting the wireless card to work. However, I have finally resolved it with a little help from Google.
