On Sun, 2008-04-27 at 13:22 -0500, Ryan Neufeld wrote: > I was going to email this exclusively to my mentor, xdotx, but I > figured there may be others who have a say. > > I am about to hop into some heavy documentation reading this week, and > frankly, I have never done anything like this before. What advice do > you more experienced programmers have on getting to know a piece of > software through documentation? Is it, say, like reading a book? > Studying for an exam? Memorization? Trial and error? Playing with code > while reading? or a mix of all of the above? > I don't think reading documentation will be a huge amount of help. tpserver-cpp isn't very well documented in many places and you will need to learn a lot via trial and error. Without a goal in mind you will quickly get frustrated and learn lots of irrelevant information.
Choose a goal like "create an empty ruleset module" and then work on getting it done. Once you have that working, move towards another goal (something like "universe generation" or similar). This will focus what you read and give you better understand on the things you do read. Learn by doing! It is pretty hard to do fatal damage with a computer (compared to other disciplines where you can actually do real physical damage - IE cut off a limb with a chainsaw ;). With offline revision control like git it is even easier to try things and when they don't work try something different. Those are my tips. Tim 'Mithro' Ansell <snip> _______________________________________________ tp-devel mailing list [email protected] http://www.thousandparsec.net/tp/mailman.php/listinfo/tp-devel
