[jacques_chester]

My problem with the Angular docs is that they're written by people who are steeped in Angular. It's the oldest problem in technical writing. How do you convey something that you grok? These videos have helped me, but when I actually sat down to cut code, I felt like I had to start all over again. I was still lost.

Lately I've been trying to use Anki to improve my recall of technical facts. Forensically deconstructing the docs has helped because I have to focus, really focus, to pick out the important things.

And it's still hard to parse anyway. Especially when there are restatements of previous restatements that are sufficiently incompatible that you wonder which is correct. I've popped the hood several times to read the damn code, which IMO sorta kinda defeats the purpose of documentation (and the fondness for large compound boolean statements gives me the heebie-jeebies).

And don't get me started on the idiocy of using sigils to configure behaviour.

I will stick with it, but I can see that I am going to be reading and re-reading and re-re-re-reading the docs and code for a few weeks yet.

edit: "The problem" to "My problem".

[darrellsilver]

I disagree. I found the tutorial for beginners really well done and when followed by the conceptual model it was solid.

We're thinking of integrating them into our course at http://www.thinkful.com/ – though we provide more structure than just the docs, they're pretty solid on their own.

Those resources are - http://docs.angularjs.org/tutorial/step_00 - http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/concepts

[at-fates-hands]

Agreed.

I actually started with Backbone and found the documentation sketchy. Nearly every tutorial had a different configuration than the last one. Backbone and Rails, Backbone, Ember and Mongo, Backbone and Coffeescript.

Nearly every one of the Angular tutorials was concise, took the same approach and used the entire framework, without any other dependencies. This made it easy to learn dig in and get going. In the few weeks I've been learning Angular, I've already built two CRUD apps and a pretty sophisticated navigation with it.

It just feels like a full fledged framework, as opposed to just a useful library.

[jacques_chester]

After the tutorial I went off and built something that wasn't, based on my current understanding, a "proper" Angular app (paging all True Scotsmen).

These videos for example showed me that creating directives is actually a central thing you do in Angular. Not just a neat thing you can do occasionally.

[ejfox]

I'd love to read more about how you use Anki. I've been using it for random things like the NATO phonetic alphabet or state capitals, but I've been wanting to try and create my own decks. I've just been having trouble wrapping my mind around how to turn knowledge like a library's documentation into cards. Any tips?

[sivers]

I've been using Anki to get fluent in Ruby and JavaScript.

See the article, “Memorizing a programming language using spaced repetition software” here:

http://sivers.org/srs

I use some super-dumb examples on that page, but I hope the points above the examples help.

Also make sure to read Piotr Wozniak's awesome “Twenty Rules of Formulating Knowledge”:

http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm

(He's the author of SuperMemo, a predecessor to Anki.)

[jacques_chester]

I was originally inspired to try it by this:

http://www.jackkinsella.ie/2011/12/05/janki-method.html

The trickiest part is knowing whether I am memorising trivialities and triteness or whether this will lead to deep understanding.

I've known about SRS for quite a while; I even wrote a project proposal to study whether it could improve academic performance of freshman compsci students.

It wasn't until I flamed out embarrassingly in a tech interview a few weeks ago that I decided that I really need to be mastering this stuff, not just bluffing my way through it.