8 Jan 2011 rkrishnan   » (Journeyer)

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning

I finished reading ”Pragmatic thinking and learning” by Andy Hunt (who wrote Pragmatic Programmer and other books). If one is really interested in self-improvement, this is the book to grab. For me, most things described in the book were known things, but it got very reinforced because Andy has some magical power to convey ideas in a very convincing way.I highly recommend this book for anyone interested to know more about learning and apply those things into their own daily lives. The book explains the process of learning using the Dreyfus model and how one advances from a beginner to an expert. Ever wondered why you get new ideas while in the bathroom? Have you noticed why you suddenly perform better when you are in the middle of good performers? I have many times noticed that I speak better english when I am talking to a good english speaker and vice versa. This book explains why, using a simplified model of the human brain.

One noteworthy suggestion in the book for every reader is to keep a personal wiki, which I had experimented with, sometime last year, with great success. I especially liked the meditation technique described in the book and can say with some confidence that it works very well. The chapter on “focus” is also very well researched. The book says that each context switch costs about 20 minutes. Interestingly, the book does not talk about the concept of flow.

I greatly enjoyed reading “Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master” earlier (despite the extremely bad packing from Flipkart, which made the paper curly, sort of permanantly).

Syndicated 2010-04-01 07:00:00 from Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan

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