Sunday, October 6, 2013

The Flow of Knowledge: Learn – Apply – Teach

“Knowledge is power”. Yes it is. But the point to be noted is that, it has one property which makes it so powerful. For a better understanding about what is that property, let us start with a short story. 

Once upon a time there was a child who doesn’t know how to walk. So he learnt how to walk from his father. After a few days he tried to walk on his own by applying the walking lesson his father had taught him and succeeded. After a few years, this child had become a fully grown man, got married and had a kid. Now the time has come for the same ‘once upon a time child’ to teach to his own child how to walk and he didn’t do it. 

What do you think would happen? Well, the child learnt how to walk on his own. But the question is, did the ‘once upon a time child’ fulfilled his responsibility? Well, you and I both know the answer. The other question is, what is wrong with the ‘once upon a time child’? Don’t worry. By the end of this article you will know what is wrong with him and even what is wrong with many of us.

I agree that “knowledge is power”, but I would say, that the flow of knowledge is what makes it so powerful. Please see the below figure. I call it ‘The Flow of Knowledge’.


Friday, October 4, 2013

Learning path to programming (for Beginners)

The very first day I joined C-language course, these are the words my programming guru Mr. Srikanth sir said, “Welcome to programming. Programming is a cream thing. But the best part is that it’s a one-time learning.  You learn programming once and for all. You might learn syntax 10 times. But programming, you learn only once”; and that’s absolutely true.

In times before him, in spite of being an IT graduate, I thought that learning programming is very hard. I always used to tell myself that I cannot do it. Most of the fresh graduates have this myth about programming that there are countless programming languages in the world and one need to learn all of them and it’s a huge feat that one cannot achieve etc etc… (Even I used to think the same.)