| >"...try programming for a day without Googling. Then two days, maybe a week. See how it feels. Remember that there was a time we programmed without copying our work." Once I decided I really wanted to learn to write code I just plain stopped with the copying and even referencing anything beyond docs or a thorough book. I work to create a functional implementation of whatever it is I'm looking for, no matter how naive, convoluted or narrow my solution ends up being. Only once that's done do I go about searching out solutions. Sometimes I'm delighted to find that what I've come up with comes very close to established solutions, other times I learn some new, concise way of going about the problem. In any case, that first sort of experimental phase is incredible for informing everything that comes after. I'd say experiencing 100 less than optimal ways to do something is far more valuable than memorizing a single optimal solution. Thing is, around the web, this sort of approach seems pretty ripe for ridicule as the Internet standard response is something like this [0]. There's a culture against discovery and creation. You either come out of the womb writing clever, idiomatic code and using or the hottest framework/library or you're an idiot. 0: http://harthur.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/771/ |