The psychology of learning
by Josh Staiger
Today, I spent some time reading Bruce Eckel's weblog. I recently picked up a copy of his book, Thinking in Java, and the more I read his stuff, the more I like the guy.
One of his entires, The Ideal Programmer, is chock full some very insightful viewpoints on the field. In the entry, he links to an essay, written by a Computer Science professor, entitled "The psychology of Learning" which spells out explictely a lot of things that it seems I have known intuitively for a long time, but never really been able to put my finger on. It does indeed make me want to be more perfection-oriented.
All very interesting, thought-provoking reads.
Material like this just makes me want to take significant blocks of time and read up on "The Art of doing X". The problem is that there are just so many different Xs and who has the time? Invariably, whenever I spend a large amount of time studying a topic that is not immediately pressing to my situation, I feel like I am neglecting those things that are (homework/studying, and soon to be work), even though I know that I will benefit greatly from it in the long run.
I think that I ideally need to get into some kind of routine where I just automatically set aside a certain percentage of time, week to week, for studying the art of doing x.
I find the burnout is till the biggest problem with schemes like this, and how to combat that? That's the holy grail. Hmm...