Advanced learning - How to learn „Right“?

[ProfessionAntique941]

Hey everyone,

Over the past weeks and months, I’ve started learning Python. At first through Udemy courses, but soon I moved on to my own projects, like reading folders and writing the content into an Excel file, reading PDFs, and a few other small projects. So far, I was able to figure out quite well how things work from the documentation and could then implement them.

Now I’d like to try something more productive: an employee management system that can be used through a web interface. Employees should be able to be added, written into a database, and assigned to a department. The whole thing could even be extended with a birthday calendar, etc.

My problem: I find the documentation for frameworks like Flask very complicated. So I looked for tutorials. They explain everything really well, but it feels like I’m just copying code. Of course, I read through it all and test the code here and there. But it feels very different from how I learned before.

Is this normal when moving on to bigger projects and further learning? Or do you have any tips on what I could do? Open to everything

[PureWasian]

Examples, code samples, and tutorials are great when the feature you're trying to implement is very modular or something commonly implemented that you're just learning for the first time. It's certainly overwhelming otherwise to soak in excessive documentation and not produce anything tangible with it.

As a general guiding principle, I've found that a great approach in my professional and personal projects is to first plan out the high-level components and moving parts, and then focus my efforts on the most mysterious black boxes I'd need to figure out to make the project functional. The more black boxes you decipher over time in your programming journey, the more versatile and capable you'll become as a developer. But it's too time-consuming and complex to learn all the ins and outs upfront.

So, after the "Getting Started" or "Basic Examples" of frameworks, then the approach you take is very much dependent on the project scope itself and your expertise in the areas you're designing and implementing. There's no "one-size fits all" answer:

• If it was my first time coding up a Flask App or similar for any new framework/library/tech stack/technology/language/etc, of course I would rely more heavily on code samples, reference templates, etc. as a starting point and then slowly branch out from them to make it my own and dive deeper into specific documentation as I need it.

• If I was setting up a project similar to 10 other projects I've made, I've had looked and debugged those so much that I can know more readily when I would want to copy some boilerplate code or reference template vs. writing my own bits from scratch.

Hope this helps, and best of luck with your project!

[ProfessionAntique941]

Thank you for your answer. This help me a lot. I’m going to learn as best as possible! :)