To hack or not to hack ?

Don't get me wrong, I don't mean on a get yourself imprisoned for exposing the 'frailties' of some of the supposedly 'secure' institutions around the world.

My point is,

When learning something new, you tend to learn from your mistakes- trial and error I suppose. Do you benefit from:-

a. Hacking away at producing 'something new' from your errors or

b. Do your utmost to learn the inns and outs of a language before commiting yourself to an initial design ?

There was an interesting post that posed the question 'why'd you code ? a while back - personally, for me it boils down to crossing that next bridge, that for a while seems like an impass. The great sense of satisfaction you get from crossing the uncrossable casm...

Well what i do is to take an area of blitz to learn for example file access commands i code little examples to figure out how best to use them, Doing this i slowley work my way through the language. So then for me its 'b', The only problem is i stall at the design stage and never realy get anything done.

Now blitzmax is another learning process, I only wish i had more time on my hands to dig deeper into the beast.

kev

I learn by doing, and asking questions when I can't do it. I can't learn from code samples, and I can't learn when I only get the answer. I need to know the in's and out's, I need to know why. And I need to *need* to know. I can't learn if I'm not motivated and I'm not motivated unless it's part of an actual project. So I just start a project and when I hit a wall, I learn what I need to get over the wall.

This sorta thing is very much a personal thing in my opinion. People learn in very different ways and the only thing you need to know is how you learn. Then you have to convince others that you're right sometimes, but that's a whole other story ;)

I always hack, but that's mainly because it's all I'm capable of. *sniffle*

whatever you are learning, and whichever way you are learning it... learn it now...

... it gets harder to learn anything once that grey hair starts filling in...

--Mike

For the one man band stuff I do, I always find it better just to begin hacking away. Even if i need a semi-major re-write, the coding helps me learn the error of my ways and is quicker than thinking it through on paper.... and more interesting. Then again, I learn the language well before attempting a major project. Never actually finished one...........

Well I have hacked, but I am mostly a slasher... I use code examples and frameworks at times to see HOW someone did something... I admit to crashing a few bits of code together from different authors to make an interesting revision (the race car game with physics and moveable wheels from the Blitz Example and a chase cam all into one comes to mind...) Generally it is a looking at how someone organized their code and saying to myself... "Why that way?" and going from there...

@Kev, yeah, I kinds go about it that way, but maybe with an eye to trying to implement my idea 'slightly' before I'm quite sure how to do it.

@ Rook Zim - sometimes it takes a bit of time to suss 'how that way ?' never mind the 'why ?' {:~>

Bugger, my hair is silver so thats me um....erm....whats the wurd.... erm......

Only 48 and ageing badly...living badly too. :)

back on subject:

Everyone has there own prefered way of learning.. personaly I code wee examples .... erm..or do I? ...erm.. :)


Cheers

Garion

I have 1 goal, everything I do in Blitz (exception to the Coinflip game) is focused towards that one goal

I learn by walking in the direction of that goal and whenever theres a wall to climb I look at the Help Docs, the Blitz Wiki and finaly the community here if neither of the former have what I need

I find myself comming to the community far too often, but I'm far too focused on one thing to stray from that path

On the hair front, I hope that your ability to learn isn't directly linked to the amount of hair folicles you have left....

Back on topic - assari's tutorials are very good. I find that on reflection, I mainly learn by doing - that is to say I'll take snippets of code from other's that are either close or potentially a stepping stone towards what I want to achieve and move forwards from there.

keep on coding / blitzing.....