A Different Approach to Learning
I need to take a new approach to learning. I’m at a point where I’m exploring more complex programs and utilities, things with long configuration files and long man pages. I need to actually learn how to use the programs properly to use them effectively.
From here on, I’ll be devoting at least a month to a particular topic. This is the basic rule, some topics may require more or less time. If something requires less, I’ll be spending some extra time practicing and honing the skill. If it requires more, I’ll keep going until I feel that I understand what I’m doing and have time to practice.
Why a month? Doesn’t that seem like a lot of time? To me it doesn’t, I’m finding that to learn how to use one tool you need to expose yourself to others. This is what happens when you’re using such a modular OS and toolset, programs build on each other. For example, if you want to use procmail (a mail processing tool) effectively, you’ll want to familiarize yourself with regular expressions (which are fascinating, this wikipedia entry is a good place to start). Giving myself *at least* 30 days to roll with something, helps me to actually learn and not just get past something in order to do something else.
What this means is that my blog postings may not be as frequent, but I believe they’ll be better.
I believe my first 30 day course will be implementing LVM. I’ve decided to start here because I’ll be setting up a new personal server shortly and I feel that configuring it properly now will save me a headache later on. I’ll be posting about the guides and tools I’m using to learn how to use LVM on a fileserver and then about the success and failures I encounter while putting everything into practice. Should be fun, more soon 
March 19th, 2007 at 9:09 am
[...] this week to plow through the docs once or twice and then start ruining VMs – This is my first month long learning project, I reckon I’ll start the timer whenever I start actually [...]