Comment by Guong Le on "What should one do after finishing a book/tutorial?"

CommentWhat should one do after finishing a book/tutorial?

Guong Le

web-dev

Nov 21, 2016

forget project - project is too big scale and will make you think too much.

Can you find a situation where you can apply what you learned, i.e. refactor.

Refactoring something old into something new and does it work well in your eco-system means that the tutorial you just watched is useful. If you try to apply everything you have learned - you will be jack of all trade and master of none and being master of nothing only get your feet wet but you never become immerse into it to actually see how useful the book/tutorial is. Furthermore a tutorial is a stepping stone. You need some bigger scale application in real world to see if what you have learned is useful.

Mario Giambanco

Director of User Experience Development

Nov 22, 2016

Your answer confuses me - at first, you say "forget project - project is too big scale and will make you think too much." but then at the end you say "You need some bigger scale application in real world to see if what you have learned is useful.". So... work on a project or don't? I don't see how refactoring someone else's code will help someone new to a language / framework / whatever. The assumption is implying that the code your refactoring was written correctly and we all know, all code is not created equally. Refactoring someone else's code might ease you into the language in question, but it could also develop bad habits; habits the original author had and again, might not be right in the first place.

@mgiambanco Fair remark - here is an explanation: If you are a complete noob - yes go for a project BUT make sure its a small one. Don't go for a full CMS for example (hence big) - yes a CMS can be big - ie think wordpress ...its not a light weight thing now is it? Take any github project out there (since its open source) and see if you can tinker with it - visit stackoverflow and take any give project that someone asked a question there and work on it yourself in another language (if you do it in another language - you won't feel compele to think in the language you just learn, you might end up copy paste).

For the more advance people (seasoned people) - lets say you went to laracast - just learned vue.js 1.x and you've been trained in Angular.js - maybe try to see if vue.js is good for you .... reformat your old angular project into vue.js to see if it fits. Start one from scratch and make side by side comparison. Etc etc

Bad Habit vs Good habbit. Internet + blogs - there is an over abundance of code out there - you can't learn that a bad habit is bad if you never seen a bad habit. promise vs callback for example or old mysql_query vs PDO (whomever is reading this - yes yes never go back to mysql_query ...but first tell your employer that he/she is a dunce for not upgrading their project's PHP first ugh....).

There are countless ways of doing loops ... for, while, foreach .... collections->each etc...you have to start somewhere. Also the author of this post never stated he was a beginner, what If someone picked up Jeffrey way or Adam Wathan's tutorial about collections and TDD course. I would be on the look out for my own code after reading and go "it worked but I feel It would be better this way" ... it might fail or it might not.

Search Hashnode