[geeko]

It sounds easy to do so. Too often however, I find myself reading how-tos and copy-pasting tutorials while building stuff...and forgetting everything after I finished.

I have the feeling that google has significantly changed the way I store things in my head (for the better or worse). Instead of remembering how things are done and why so, I at best save a mental hyperlink to the information or worse, I just rely on google to be available and give me the tutorial/code snippet I need at that very moment (and again forgetting all afterwards).

Being forced to reproduce what you've learned at least once without having google is actually useful (at least for the way my brain works).

[mrtron]

Read a book on Zen.

Approach everything with a "beginner's mind". Never blow through a new tutorial cutting and pasting even if you are very experienced in the area. Take your time, learn as a beginner, but leverage your experience to instantly jump from beginner to expert once you have the necessary domain knowledge.

[DTrejo]

Is there a specific book you found helpful?

[mrtron]

I enjoyed http://www.amazon.ca/Zen-Mind-Beginners-Shunryu-Suzuki/dp/08...

A well written combination biography + philosophy book on Zen.

[samdk]

My solution is to make my first project in a language too complicated to be able to search around and find code snippets to incorporate. That's not to say I don't spend a ton of time searching around for tutorials or things like that, it's just that most of the things I find are at best tangentially related to what I'm doing, and just copy/pasting isn't enough to actually help me: I need to adapt what I find.

When I do this, I find I get a better understanding of things faster and also retain it for a lot longer.

[gte910h]

Then find out why these snippets work better than you're doing.

Favor books over the web. Books generally have better exposition.

[roc]

The trick is to not use the How-Tos.

Build something you actually care about. You can refer to the tutorials to get the basic skeleton up, but fleshing out the details is where you'll learn and retain.

[geeko]

Ok, seems like I'm the only one with googlelitis.