Back in college I had taken several computer programming languages. I had the opportunity (at times I use that term loosely) to learn COBOL, RPG, Visual Basic, C, Assembler, and the markup language called HTML. This was over ten years ago, so many of the languages used today, such as C# weren’t around then.
I remember the first time I had to write an exam in one of those languages. It came as a surprise to learn that the exam was open book. In face, pretty much all exams for the programming languages were open book. After thinking about that for a moment I realized why they were open book.
Understanding Is a Foundation of Learning
Learning programming languages can be difficult for some, and easy for others. The trouble many people probably have with them is that they try to memorize the languages, instead of understanding them. For those that memorize the language, they know the structure of a “while” loop, but they may not know when to use it. This type of learning is backwards, and was probably one of the reasons the exams in my programming courses were open book – don’t memorize the structure – understand when to use it.
Another good example of understanding over memorizing is with securing a wireless router. For many, a wireless router can be confusing to secure. The reason for this is because they don’t understand how to secure the router.
I have secure many routers, and not all of the same type. I don’t memorize where the options are in each router, that would definitely be beyond my mental capacity, but I know what I need to do to secure the router. I understand what is needed, so I access the router’s administrative pages and look for the settings I need to secure the router.
Once the router is secured, I know what I need to connect devices to the secured wireless router. Each device has it’s own interface, but they would all have the same options to connect to the router, which I understand and am able to configure.
With my knowledge of wireless networking, I am now able to configure different devices to different wireless routers, regardless of what the user-interface looks like simply because I understand what needs to be done.
How Programming Taught Me To Understand
For those that have visited my blog in the past, you may have noticed that change my theme on a regular basis, and I just did it recently. I have also moved from Blogger to WordPress almost two years ago.
Since my switch to WordPress I have been understanding how WordPress is designed. While I am not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, I have learned quite a bit. My understanding of databases has allowed me to write queries, and explore the WordPress database (I never had any experience with MySQL before WordPress). All I needed to know was how to access the database from WordPress, and the structure of the SQL queries.
As the years went by I learned other programming and markup languages. My experience with past languages has enabled me to learn the new languages and create applications easier than if I didn’t have an understanding of the basic principles of application development. Applying this idea of understanding, as I did with programming languages, has benefited me in may facets of my life.
While undestanding can also benefit you in different areas of your life, if you wish to learn technology – you must first understand the underlying principles. As you understand those, you will soon begin to memorize what you need know.