Google is the best college and StackOverflow is the best professor
So a guy on LinkedIn was reminiscing today about his wasted college days, how bad his professors were, college facilities were, etc. That's generally typical of a tier-3 Indian city.
That's exactly why all the importance is on self learning these days. Self learning is, in fact, the best kind of learning because you decide the medium of getting the knowledge and you set your own pace of learning.
Its not even necessary to spend a fortune on expensive courses these days, especially in programming or computer science. Google powered organic searches are your best bet when you want to understand a concept, no professor can beat that be it online or offline!
People often argue that in order to learn that way, you must "know what to look for on Google". But even that isn't needed if you think about it. In fact, progressive or incremental growth of knowledge is the whole point of organic learning, that's exactly how our brain functions - start from an initial central concept, then wander around in all directions organically until you find the related stuff you don't understand. Then make that related concept the central point and search from there and so on and so forth.
Organic keyword searches are no different, you search for "python" and you come to know that its used in data science, there is a numeric library called "numpy" and a web framework called "django". Maybe you're interested in web development, so you search"django framework", then you come to know that its a whole ecosystem, there is a nice ORM (object relational mapper) called django-orm, etc.
Reaching from python to django-orm would have taken an unnecessarily long, inefficient and costly route if you'd gone through a professor or expensive course!
Don't sign up for costly courses from MIT, Stanford, Michigan, Coursera, etc., those capitalists will extract from you for what turns out at the end of the day to be some reading of official docs, some practice and some googling.
Instead, keep a habit of self learning the stuff yourself by doing those things. Google stuff and read great technical articles written by bloggers across the world on platforms like Medium, Blogger, WordPress, etc. That way, not only will you help the small dude (by providing him/her page views) but the whole system will become more efficient as middlemen and peddlers of expensive courses go out of business.
As a plus, you also learn a lot from these bloggers who are all experts in their fields. This is clearly a win-win for all of us!
That's exactly why all the importance is on self learning these days. Self learning is, in fact, the best kind of learning because you decide the medium of getting the knowledge and you set your own pace of learning.
Its not even necessary to spend a fortune on expensive courses these days, especially in programming or computer science. Google powered organic searches are your best bet when you want to understand a concept, no professor can beat that be it online or offline!
People often argue that in order to learn that way, you must "know what to look for on Google". But even that isn't needed if you think about it. In fact, progressive or incremental growth of knowledge is the whole point of organic learning, that's exactly how our brain functions - start from an initial central concept, then wander around in all directions organically until you find the related stuff you don't understand. Then make that related concept the central point and search from there and so on and so forth.
Organic keyword searches are no different, you search for "python" and you come to know that its used in data science, there is a numeric library called "numpy" and a web framework called "django". Maybe you're interested in web development, so you search"django framework", then you come to know that its a whole ecosystem, there is a nice ORM (object relational mapper) called django-orm, etc.
Reaching from python to django-orm would have taken an unnecessarily long, inefficient and costly route if you'd gone through a professor or expensive course!
Don't sign up for costly courses from MIT, Stanford, Michigan, Coursera, etc., those capitalists will extract from you for what turns out at the end of the day to be some reading of official docs, some practice and some googling.
Instead, keep a habit of self learning the stuff yourself by doing those things. Google stuff and read great technical articles written by bloggers across the world on platforms like Medium, Blogger, WordPress, etc. That way, not only will you help the small dude (by providing him/her page views) but the whole system will become more efficient as middlemen and peddlers of expensive courses go out of business.
As a plus, you also learn a lot from these bloggers who are all experts in their fields. This is clearly a win-win for all of us!
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