So you need to learn (about) this technology… So you go to google… So you spent X minutes (hours? days?) to find a good candidate-article (tutorial, how to, step-by-step guide, etc.)… So you finish reading it… and most of the time you doing what? – exactly!  – going back to google and keep searching.

More often than not there are two main things that we are looking for when we need to learn something new:

1. We want to learn it fast
2. We want to learn it fast

See the difference? :) Here it is – the "first fast" goes for the quality of content that a source has to offer. The better the quantity, the more we learn, the faster we learn. And the "second fast" goes to the amount of time we search for that source of knowledge.

The "first fast" is going to be solved by only dealing with SIMPLE tutorials/guides/ideas about many simple and comlex topics. Simplicity is the key to solve "the quality of content" problem. Think about an IBM Redbook on something you do not know about, let’s say web services. Although it is a great book – lot’s of content – it is a very poor example of an efficient tutorial (not for all, but for most), it just has too much and will take hours to go through. Most of the time a redbook will make you quite sleepy on the page number 24 (my own observation).

And for comparison take this picture from soaspecs.com:

and spice it up with "SOAP::Lite for Perl" quick guide.

A combination of the two (pic and guide) will take you 5-10 minutes to go over and will make you understand what/how/why/etc.. about webservices. Although the guide is Perl based, it will by no means distract you from understanding the material even if you are not familiar with Perl, why? Because it is SIMPLE, that’s why.

In order to solve the "second fast", I would like to speak to everybody who is going to read this post. If you have a very cool and SIMPLE tutorial, how-to, guide, etc.., please share it with everybody by going to the comments section of this post and putting one or more links to it, or ideas where to get these very simple tutorials.

Later on I will compile this list, and either post it on a different website (if you like, I can put your name as a contributor, with a link to the tutorial/idea and your website, if you have it) or I will create a different post. This will be solving the "second fast" – decreasing the time of searching for the right source.

Apply yourself – KISS that technology! :)

 

This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 17:25 and is filed under cool places, hardware, linux, me, software, tutorials. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.