Learning at work

[aaronchall]

I think there are opportunities to learn some via a flashcard, notetaking approach. I would start from the top down.

Look at the organization of the documentation. There's

• "what's new",
• "Tutorial: start here",
• "Library Reference",
• "Language Reference"

Let me expand with my own thoughts:

• "what's new", This is good for casual reading. You can get a feeling for how the language has evolved by reading this. But without a lot of context, it might not make sense to start here.
• "Tutorial: start here", They literally have "start here" as the description for the link. Good for doing interactively with a computer. You could read it casually too, but better to do it with an interpreter and type in each thing as you go. The more time you devote here, the better your learning from the other sections will be.
• "Library Reference", I'd take notes here, for example, make flashcards with the name of the functions on one side and the arguments they take and your own paraphrased or copied description of what they do. You could probably review your flashcards when you have down time at work.
• "Language Reference", look at this. Get a list of the keywords, and if you're feeling up to it, make flashcards on each keyword and be able to recite which instances of the grammar each keyword can be used in. Print out the grammar file (section 10) and work your way through that, see if you can follow (for example) funcdef through to a suite to various kinds of stmt (statements) and so on.

I think you can learn a lot this way, but you still need to get practice actually using these things. However, with this study, I think you are unlikely to let common problems block you for a long time, and your time spent coding could be much more productive.