Study List
You know that feeling that you have too much to learn and too little time? Well, I'm currently attempting to learn the following things:
- Unit Testing and TDD (using NUnit and RhinoMocks mocking)
- Castle Stuff
- ActiveRecord (and through it, a little bit of NHibernate)
- MonoRail (MVC framework for ASP.NET)
- Windsor (IoC container)
- Boo (python-like language for .NET)
- C# 3.0 and LINQ
- SQL Server (but just a bit)
- Working with Resharper (especially template authoring)
I am now trying to a simple web project in which I will incorporate all of this, and it is turning up to be quite fun and challenging.
My strategy is this: Learn almost nothing up front. Try to do something. Get stuck. Learn what I need to solve the problem. So I would learn only the most basic ActiveRecord stuff to start working, but as soon as I hit a road-block (changing the naming strategy for my property-column mapping) I dig in the documentation. This works quite well and prevents me from reading long articles/documentation sections up front. I just take what I need and move on.
Still, this is very time consuming. It also makes me glad I haven't begun doing my masters degree. What I'm studying at home just seems a lot more interesting and useful, and I know that going back to the university will leave me little time, if any, to really learn new technologies.