Study Guide - Skills and Interest

[kanoy83]

hi guys,

This topic might be a little bit common sense but I do also believe it can help so much to beginners and experts.

As a developer, I always have great interest in other languages although time and effort to learn is to be strictly applied and manage. My only question is:

Is there an Effective Dynamic Study Guide for any person who wants to learn a language and some few skills in IT, let say in a month or 3 months or depends upon the subjects?

My Interests are(in order): PHP, MySQL, C#, Ruby on Rails, Python, Cisco, Windows Server

Respectively, i will rate my self out of 10: 6, 5, 3, 3, 5, 6

What are your thoughts?

Thanks! Cheers!

[phorce]

First off all, in my honest opinion I wouldn't "rate" myself in languages. Whatever the language/rating is. From my view, let's say I rated myself 10/10 for PHP.. That's kind of like saying: I know EVERYTHING about PHP Thus meaning with that attitude I might not be able to progress with things.. You CAN learn something new everyday about a language providing you're active in this, of course.

On a subnote, it's difficult to answer the question on study guides because everyone learns differently. This question is like asking: What is the best programming language ask 10 different people, you're more than likly to get 10 different answers. However, I learn a new language, or, learn more about a specific language by participating in projects; specifically that challenges me and interests me (I don't want to get bored!).. Do I think you should have a study guide to say:

• Monday - C++
• Tuesday - PHP
• ....

No. Just think of projects, and, as well as this, make sure you participate in forums like Daniweb, interact and view the questions and attempt to answer them, even if it means opening up a text editor and compiling, you will/should lean.

Hope this helps a bit :)

Thanks

[L7Sqr]

Personally, I feel the best way to improve your skills is to use them. In the programming world that means two things: read code and write code. Find and/or join an open source project and start exploring. Add your own components. Understand how the code is put together. You will only advance so far as a PHP developer by reading books or tutorials. Once you grok another PHP-based project and contribute your own portions of that project you will be worlds beyond what any text will provide.