Thoughts Regarding Learning

So the main problem with being an autodidactic learner like myself is that your faced with many problems usually never even considered by more passive learners. The first of these is obtaining good information to begin with. This can be particularly frustrating because often when your at the beginning of learning something new you really know very little about it so its hard to assess what the quality of the material is to begin with. This can lead to learning poor solutions to things or in worst case scenarios just getting wrong information. This puts the responsibility on yourself for cross referencing knowledge  to make sure its legit. The next problem is having your learning become a jumbled mess of inconsistent knowledge. This is where you learn 50% of what you need to succeed and then just keep spamming what you know to do everything. I guess it would help if I used a specific example of what I've been learning recently which has been programming little video games in as3 using the flash IDE. So basically there are a couple different ways to make video games and  this makes it sort of easy to stick with the first methods you learn and resist all the other ways without actually understanding the advantages and disadvantages between different approaches. This problem could be mirrored by any sort of creative practice from writing music to writing novels. Basically sometimes you can get stuck into using the patterns that you understand the most rather then the best ones. Similarly to the earlier problem the only way you really get around this by yourself is being opened minded to everything regarding what you're learning and sort of piecing it together by yourself. You have to suspend a lot of concrete ideas until you get really deep into a topic. So, I'm still kind of stuck in this transitory position in programming video games. Its like I KNOW some things but I also know there are different ways to do the same things. So basically I think the best thing is to try not to reuse too much of anything until you know its here to stay. As a last note to everyone listening the project to finish all this reading/ coding has been progressing nicely. Still have a shitload of work too go.


Books:

Essential Guide to Flash Games: 520 --> 450
AdvancED ActionScript 3.0 Animation: 440
AdvancED Game Design with Flash: 740
Game Design AS3: 40
Game Design Workshop: 450 --> 425
ActionScript 3.0 animation: 100 --> 50

total pages = 2290 --> 2140