Suck at reading? Watch or listen instead.
One of my biggest weaknesses is reading speed. I must read something a few times before extracting meaning. Recently, I’ve embraced this and know that if I want to learn something I should just find the same content in a different medium.
While in school, I compensated for my lack of reading comprehension by paying extremely close attention during lectures. I avoided any classes that required heavy reading and took as many STEM classes as possible. In college, I claimed to hate subjects like History, Humanities and English. Looking back I know it was mostly just fear of failing.
People often ask if I’ve read certain books and my answer is usually “I don’t know how to read.” I’ll explain that rather than reading a book I’ll spend some time finding a video screencast, podcast or audiobook that covers the same subject. Today, educational tech content is so available it’s awesome.
Wait, aren’t there way more books than podcasts and videos? Great question! There are certainly more written content than audio/video content about web development. That said, it’s unreasonable to assume that someone would read all the books. It’s also fair to say there is a lot of overlap in many of the books. I’ve been following my listen/watch focused learning strategy for about 4 years now and I’ve never run out of content (and I listen to podcasts at 1.5x).
Great resources for watching web development content:
- http://www.rubytapas.com/ – Great resource for ruby fundamentals.
- http://railscasts.com/ – Starting to get dated, but are a good place to start when learning rails.
- https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/screencasts – Awesome TDD, Bash, Git stuff.
- http://yuiblog.com/crockford/ – Interesting history and fundamentals of javascript.
- http://www.confreaks.com/videos – Conference talks.
Great resources for listening to web development content:
- http://devchat.tv/ruby-rogues/ – Often cohosted by famous ruby devs.
- http://devchat.tv/js-jabber/ – Often cohosted by famous javascript devs.
- http://giantrobots.fm/ – About half and half business and dev interviews.