How to put theory into practise

Question

I like to read alot of IT books e.g programming / functional. But the problem is that after reading I cannot find reasons to put it into practise and I soon forget what I read.

Any advise?

Answer 1

Find a real problem to solve. A job would be ideal.

Answer 2

When I'm interested in a new technology/technique I typically put together a project in my "sandbox" to experiment with it. The project doesn't need to be very complicated and you don't always have to finish it, it's a learning exercise after all.

For example, when I was experimenting with Ruby/Rails I put together a small pictoral directory of our department with the ability to upload and manage pictures, search, etc. It never made it off my developer machine and I've never actually used Ruby on a production project, but I learned a lot about MVC and the active record pattern that I've been able to put to use in my .NET-based web development.

You might also consider finding and working through some tutorials related to what you're learning. By far the best way is to search out new things that you can actually put to use on a current or near future project, but that's not always doable.

Answer 3

Read only books about projects you are doing at the moment. That way you'll put what you read in practise and you don't forget it that easily.

Also, when reading, do some code snippets to try out what you are doing and see if you really understand the concepts you are reading about.

Answer 4

The best way to develop something , a game for example.

I would also like to point out although you would start by trying to implement theory , more often than not you will likely end up doing and learning more than what is in the books :)

Answer 5

When you don't know how to use it in practice, you're probably reading the wrong book. I've read a lot of books, the most of them have some practice examples. But you shouldn't wanna use a particular technique, just use the right tool for the right job.

If you really wanna learn a lot (after you learned the syntax obviously), you should start up a quite complex project, you can make it as difficult as you want to.. But if your quite advanced in one or more programming language, you could also find a job with it, then you'll have real projects to learn from, and get some money from.

Answer 6

What I'm doing is the tool/utility development for my own purposes. As soon as I've read/found some valuable method of getting the complicated thing work an easy way, I'm trying to implement that. This way you will not forget that soon, and thus, you have the source as the reference at your hand.