5/16/04
<< 72 Squared WeblogAh, the power of google
I think I learned to program entirely because of google. I never took
a programming class. I read a whole bunch of books - everything I could
get my hands on, from Enterprise Java Beans to Javascript, to PHP. But
mostly, I just googled stuff.
As the only web developer at my work, I could not collaborate with other developers or learn one-on-one from an instructor. I had to find solutions on my own, and fast. Enter Google! It is amazing what you can find online. Programmers are surprisingly generous in sharing their experience. I soaked it in. Fortunately I read really quickly, as necessary skill learned in college when I often had 3 or 4 thousand pages to read in a quarter ( I was an english lit major). I found I was reading much more on the web now, although mostly I scanned a lot, looking for answers to specific problems. Usually I could find the answer online in some forum or another. Occasionally, I had to ask the question, but most of the time someone else had already had the same problem. Google search results consistently returned results that matched my questions exactly. Amazing!