Assignment 20 - Benjamin Givens

The key to learning how to program is understanding how to correctly find the solution to your problem. This seems easy at first: just google it. The problem is that in reality the project your doing right now isn't nearly as important as the knowledge gained from doing it.

When you google a problem, one of the first links will be someone who already asked your question on stackoverflow.

This page will usually have several answer: one of them will be code that will solve your problem, another will condemn question as being fundamentally flawed, another one will tell you to look at the documentation.

I have learned that if you just copy and paste or adapt the given code, you won't understand how your own program works, which does you no good. However, attempting to read the documentation as a learner is extremely challenging, because it is designed to be useful to people who already have a sense of what's going on and need an even deeper understanding.

What you need to do is look at how the given answer attack's the problem and research the individual elements, so that you can implement a "ground up" solution and really understand what you are doing. I personally use dotnetperls, as I find it has easy to understand explanations of how things work, despite its awful webdesign.

Youtube can also be an invaluable resource if you find some channels that do a good job of explaining the material.