Thread: Quick Help for Code

Well then thank goodness the United States Army is going to spend top dollar telling me to forget everything from school and start fresh. And yes, this is exactly what they do so don't try to tell me they don't. I know plenty of friends in the military that had exactly this done.

Also, people have different learning processes. Me personally, I'm a visual learner. You want to know how I learned Calculus, Physics, Statics, and nearly every other subject? I looked at the solutions manual to see how problems were solved, solved a few following the solutions manual, and 9 times out of 10 I never had to look at the solutions manual again because at that point I understood what was going on. This is due to having 90% foreign teachers that do not know how to teach to save their lives, and on top of that have a horrible accent, especially in the computer science field.

Just because your learning habits are different than mine, does not mean mine don't work.

Somebody could have simply took 2 minutes out of their day to actually help me, like anduril did, but instead, decided to take 20 minutes out of their day to explain how my approach is all wrong. Opinions are like ..............s, everybody's got one and everyone thinks everyone else's stinks.

Originally Posted by jbonns

Well then thank goodness the United States Army is going to spend top dollar telling me to forget everything from school and start fresh. And yes, this is exactly what they do so don't try to tell me they don't. I know plenty of friends in the military that had exactly this done.

Irrelevent. The army may ask you to "unlearn" some stuff, I'm sure they do, but unless you develop skills that allow you to understand the new information, you're as dead in the water as you are anywhere else.

Also, people have different learning processes. Me personally, I'm a visual learner. You want to know how I learned Calculus, Physics, Statics, and nearly every other subject? I looked at the solutions manual to see how problems were solved, solved a few following the solutions manual, and 9 times out of 10 I never had to look at the solutions manual again because at that point I understood what was going on.

Well, good for you. In my career (electronic service) I probably trained more than 500 technicians, often holding classroom sessions for new products, but mostly taking them in as apprentices. Generally "visual learners" are memorizers who do become capable technicians so long as nobody throws them a curve ball such as a device they've never seen before. Then they hit the wall because they can't visualize the problem, have no frame of reference to work from and simply stall out for the want of some simple troubleshooting skills.

One perfect example of this came while I was working in office automation. Someone brought in a geiger counter to be fixed... definately not part of our product line, but still a good customer and someone we wanted to accomodate. All the "memorize the schematic" types just stared at it in disbelief... They simply didn't know what to do with it and couldn't figure out how to troubleshoot it. I gave it to the guy who's always in the books looking stuff up and figuring things out as he goes... Guess what, 20 minutes later it's working!

Thinking that you can learn problem solving skills by staring at solutions is a fools errand. You don't learn to think "out of the box" that way. All you learn is a set of prepackaged solutions that, granted, will serve you well; until you run into that one situation you've never seen before then suddenly you become aware that "visual learning" just doesn't teach you how to think your way through a unique problem.

Just because your learning habits are different than mine, does not mean mine don't work.

Actually... it does.

I learn by solving the puzzles that are handed to me.

For example: I was recently given the task of reformatting about 1000 playlist files (part of a jukebox network) that were created in multiple forms of Unicode. The first task was to figure out how to open and import all these playlists some of which were in totally dissimilar formats. I did what you probably would do, I went searching... but not for code... I went searching for an understanding of "Endianness", "Unicode" etc. The basics for solving the puzzle. Once I understood the problem I was able to code the solution.

This was a problem I'd never seen before, unlike anything in my experience. There was no code out there, no examples, no open source... If I relied upon "visual learning" from solutions already in existance, I would never have gotten the job done.

These are skills you DO NOT develop with scoop and poop code... The solution had to be 100% "from scratch" or it wasn't going to get done at all.

Somebody could have simply took 2 minutes out of their day to actually help me, like anduril did, but instead, decided to take 20 minutes out of their day to explain how my approach is all wrong. Opinions are like ..............s, everybody's got one and everyone thinks everyone else's stinks.

Ok, well, good luck with that....

Well congratulations, you explained to me some things that have worked for you. This works for me.

As you explained about your workers who memorize things versus the one that's head is always in books, they are two different type learners and I'm sure on many occasions, the folks that are visual learners are much more productive than the ones that's heads are in the books. This is exactly why people are hired for different purposes. If I can do things by memory in 20 minutes that anybody else it takes 40 minutes, well then I am much more productive at that point. Yes, there may be curve balls thrown at certain times, however, they come a lot less often. At that point, I'll step aside and let the other person take care of most of it. That's called delegation. Use your head and know to step back and ask questions when you don't know what is going on, which is exactly what I am doing here. You can't always be a winner, now can you?