[Foreign quotes] technical books vs. Google

Yesterday I saw an interesting post on stackexchange: Why do people use programming technology books? (Why do people use programming books?).

I am going to share my thoughts with you today.

When I wrote this article, this post ranked second among the top questions in the stackexchange group. The author's question is as follows:

I found that when someone asks how to program, someone else usually provides him/her a book order.

But I don't think everyone learns programming through reading books. Some people only encounter problems, learn programming, and then use programming as a tool to solve the problem.

For me, I was programming because I wanted to build a server for my own games. At that time, Google found the support document for that server to solve the problem. Now I am already a software engineer, and my ability does not depend on books at all, all from the technology I learned when I used C # to write programs to the game server.

So my problem is:In general, is it easier to learn programming technology through books?For me, reading is boring and hard to stick.

SofaThe answer points are clear, so they won the highest vote.

His core idea is that books are orderly and can cultivate a complete knowledge system. Google can only solve the "how to" problem that can be described with clear keywords, and the content on the network is full of garbage.

The author's original words are as follows:

Google is suitable for answering "how to" questions, but you cannot use Google to understand what you lack. For example, you can search for "C # hosting" to solve some of your C # hosting problems, what if you don't know that C # has a hosting mechanism? If this happens, you can use the hosting mechanism to solve the problem. Can you still use Google to solve your problem?

Moreover, the Internet is full of garbage. If you have enough knowledge to tell which ones are useful and which ones are useless, it will be good. If not, all kinds of "noise" will only increase your head.

The author also talked about how he studied:

1. Buy Books
2. Review the overview page (you do not have to read one page, but you must know the location of each knowledge point)
3. Find a small project
4. Use books as a reference and gain experience from practice
5. questions that cannot be answered by books, Google

(Sometimes 3 occurs first)

This reading method is also very helpful. If you think it is boring and hard to stick to it, try it.

This answer aroused the resonance of many netizens. One of the replies said:

A good answer. I used Google when I was learning ASP. NET. I had a few years of C # programming experience at the beginning, so I thought I could solve it. I Google every time I encounter problems, but as time goes on, I find that I only have a lot of "Tips )", each of these tips can only solve small problems in very specific situations. In this way, I will never really master ASP. net, which is like ASP. net is a big iceberg, and every time you see only the tip of the iceberg, you will never know what the iceberg looks like. Books provide systematic knowledge, just like an iceberg panorama. So read the book. Oh, by the way, let's just say, don't look at those books like "X days into XXX", such as what "deep understanding of xx" and "XX advanced programming" are good books.

This netizen actually added a very important point:Those books with a complete knowledge system can truly give you the knowledge you don't get online.. This is a complete knowledge system. With it, you will know what ASP. NET can do and cannot do, rather than Google every time you encounter problems.

In addition to the advantages of the knowledge system, another advantage of books isBooks include the author's rich experience. A netizen gave an example:

Some of my classmates have learned Java and they do not read books. After several years of Java Development, they repeatedly generate byte [] during data copying and then assign values to array elements cyclically. The fact is that system. arraycopy can accomplish this task better and faster. This method is described on page 155 of Java in a nutshell.

I hope you can realize that it is much easier to learn with Teacher guidance than to learn by yourself. A book is like a teacher's lecture. With it, you are like a teacher, and it is much cheaper than asking for help.

Summary

Books and networks are two different sources of knowledge. Due to their respective characteristics, they can solve different problems:

	Books	Network
Price	Usually charged	Usually free of charge
Use cycle	Long	Short
Information Quality	Usually relatively high	Uneven and random content
Solve the problem	Learning complete knowledge system	Solve specific problems (usually small issues)

(Full text)