Learning Properly

[ssc456]

Hey guys,

I've got a small problem at the moment.
I've been playing about with development for atleast 5 years + now and would confidently say sit me in front of Visual Studio and I could confidently build you anything in C#.

The problem I have is that I can't get this across in an interview or in a test.
The problem Is I learnt the same way many people have, my picking apart other peoples code, expanding on it and manipulating it.

From this I can now write code from scratch.
However what I can't do is tell you the terminology of things.

ie I was asked in an interview to define the difference between a property and a method (I can tell you now). But in the interview I was like I don't know? Despite the fact that I was using the two on a daily basis I didn't understand the terminology.

How have you guys learnt your programming languages properly?

 

[root]

I sat a course in C over a few years whilst I was at university.

That said.
it's probably one of those get a book moments, or sign up to devshed and start helping people.
or stack overflow.

sounds like a real pain, but to be honest, if you spend some time on a forum like that you'll soon have the proper terms learned, it's be a necessity that you'll have to learn them in order to properly get your point across.

Though I have to say I find it a bit strange that you're working as a dev in a software house and haven't at least picked up some of the lingo.

 

[ssc456]

I sat a course in C over a few years whilst I was at university.

That said.
it's probably one of those get a book moments, or sign up to devshed and start helping people.
or stack overflow.

sounds like a real pain, but to be honest, if you spend some time on a forum like that you'll soon have the proper terms learned, it's be a necessity that you'll have to learn them in order to properly get your point across.

Though I have to say I find it a bit strange that you're working as a dev in a software house and haven't at least picked up some of the lingo.

Oh I have picked up some of the terms it's just some areas I haven't needed, because commercially I have only ever worked on 1 product there are a lot of areas that have not been covered in too much detail.

There are things like using Private and Public, not I've known when to use them but couldn't put into words why?

I am in a strange old situation?

My company have bought me an MSDN subscription so I'm constantly looking on there for tutorials and courses etc.

 

[berry120]

If you know the stuff, it shouldn't be too hard to learn the terminology, and you *should* learn the terminology to best understand and describe what's going on. When you write code, start explaining to yourself as though you were explaining it to someone else - explain why you've used public here and private there for instance. Explain why this is a method and this is a property. Explain why you've used inheritance here rather than composition.

As well as this, get a good book on your language of choice and work through it, you'll be able to sail through various bits but take time to go through those bits carefully that explain the terminology and design decisions. Be prepared to learn from knowing these things as well.

The thing is, if I was interviewing someone for a role and they told me (or even showed me) they could code a working program in C#, but didn't understand much terminology, I'd be worried. Creating something that works isn't the same as creating something where the code is well structured, easily read and maintainable, and understanding theory and terminology is imperative to be able to do that properly (and communicate properly with people on your team.)

 

[DogSong]

I literally sat down in blender and learned python by reading a game movement code, and I memorized how each part works, and I was able to recreate the code without looking once again at the original, and I even did modifications to it. My girlfriends dad is going to teach me COBOL sometime soon