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“A little learning is a dangerous thing.
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring;
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again.” ― Alexander Pope, An Essay On Criticism That's a good one to keep in mind while sailing the seas of information. A little experience will help as well - for example, a video 'promising to teach you quantum physics in 15 minutes' is surely utter nonsense. Given fifteen months of uninterrupted study, assuming you had a solid grasp of the relevant mathematics already, and a good instructor, then you'd perhaps have a decent grasp of the basics. This doesn't mean you can't find an interesting article on quantum physics online without having a grasp of the basic mathematical approaches... but search engines really are garbage these days. I really can't believe half the autocompletes delivered from 'quantum physics of...' in the search box. QM of love? consciousness? manifestation? WTF. You have to know a little bit and make the searches more explicit. For example, 'quantum physics of beta decay' will return a lot of interesting articles, some even well-written. In general, it's much more rewarding to go narrow but deep than broad but shallow when digging into a subject. As far as finding reliable sources for things like learning a programming language, generally the loudest opinionators are the least reliable, and Reddit programming language subreddits are often best avoided entirely - that only leads to anxiety paralysis (not a bad description as you put it). Again, often upping the specificity of the search leads to good results. For example, 'Learning the C programming language' can be way too broad. "Learning how to use C for network programming" gets better results, but you still have to dig through them. Sometimes the same thing keeps getting referenced, in this case "Beej's Guide To Network Programming Using Internet Sockets". I like it, everyone seems to think it's great, go with that. This kind of background research takes time and effort, but then once you've got something that seems good, stop there. Browsing time is over. Now it's time for single-pointed concentration on a single text, that's the way to actually learn new things. |