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hello everybody Kyle here from web dev simplified this video is going to be a
bit different than my usual tutorial style videos because instead of teaching
you a specific topic i'm going to teach you how to learn about any topic that
you're interested in these are the steps that I personally use as well as many
people that I know use in order to learn new technologies frameworks or languages
and it works incredibly well for me and hopefully will work well for you also so
without any further adieu let's get started the first step that you need to
take is to actually research the topic that you want to learn this can be done
through articles podcasts or video format but I prefer to use videos and
podcasts because I can actually speed up the audio quicker than if I was reading
an article for example because I can listen much quicker than I can read and
also these videos and podcasts and articles should not be tutorial based
they should be purely informational so that you can learn about what this
technology is why you should use it and a little bit about how it works
but not really how you should implement it the goal of this research is so that
by the time you're done with the research you can explain what this
concept or technology or language or framework is to someone in a way that
would make them understand it and so that means that you actually have a
fairly deep understanding of what the idea is even if you don't know how to
use this idea another goal of this research is that by the end of it you
should have a pretty solid understanding of the pros and cons of using this
certain language or topic or framework and also you should know of any
libraries or frameworks that are popular and helpful in using this actual
language so for nodejs a very popular framework is expressed so you should
know about the existence of this framework so you can possibly learn it
later in your learning experience for learning nodejs
the next thing you're going to want to do is actually start to learn about how
you can use this sort of topic and how it works and to do that you need to go
in and read the documentation but you don't need to go into the nitty-gritty
of the documentation almost every language framework or topic has a
getting started or introduction section in their documentation that you should
familiarize yourself with so that you can read through it and have a basic
understanding of how you would set up a prod
of this magnitude you may also want to read documentation on how to install
anything that you need installed on your computer in order to start working with
this language or framework and the entire idea of learning about how to set
up an application and so that you can do part 3 which is to create a hello world
application now depending on what you're learning this hello world application
may be a bit different but in general a hello world application is just a very
small application the smallest size possible that allows you to use this
language or framework so for a node.js application this would essentially just
be a server that you create that prints out something to the screen usually the
text hello world is what people like to use when creating this first hello world
style application this shouldn't be a very hard task to do but as you run into
problems you can Google tutorials or instructional videos or anything like
that look through the documentation in order
to figure out how to get past these roadblocks that you encountered in your
learning process this idea of the hello world application is to get you just the
basic understanding of how to get something working and then that way you
can add on to it without having extra problems of trying to get it working and
adding on to it at the same exact time the fourth thing that you need to do is
to actually build a small application around this idea so for node.js you
would build a very small node.js application it is also really important
that you make sure that this small application includes nothing else that's
new to you other than what you're trying to learn if you're trying to learn
node.js for example don't try to throw in a bunch of extra things such as a
react framework on the front end of this small application if you don't already
know react and even if you do know react you probably don't need it for this
small application that you're building since the emphasis is on learning
node.js so anything else that's not related to what you're trying to learn
keep to an absolute minimum and spend the least amount of time that you can on
it in order to build this application and one last thing about this fourth
step of building a small application is don't skip the hello world application
you may think that well this small application is really not too much
bigger than a hello world and hello worlds are boring so I'm just gonna skip
that but please don't do that the hello world application really helps
you get started and figure out how to actually use this technology in the
smallest way possible which in the long run will say
you so much more time than you spend actually working on that HelloWorld
application because in reality the HelloWorld application
shouldn't take you very long so you're really not wasting much time but you're
learning so much in that small amount of time the next step is going to be
dependent on what you're learning but then is to create another small
application and possibly even the exact same small application but to use some
popular frameworks or libraries inside of that application so for node.js for
example Express is one of the most popular frameworks that you can be using
for a node.js application and almost nobody creates node.js applications
without some form of framework to help make it easier so in this fifth step it
would be to take that small application you already built or build another
similar small application but use that framework or libraries such as Express
to help make your learning process easier and the building of the
application easier this will help you understand a more real-world sense of
how this technology works since instead of just using basic node which almost no
one does for building a web application you'll be building it with Express which
is extremely popular and tons of people in cross all different industries will
be using Express and note together this will also allow you to see the pros and
cons of this actual framework because if you're building a very similar or the
same application you'll see where it's easier and where it's harder with using
that framework and it's important to make sure you do this framework part
after you've actually built the original application because you don't want to
try to learn a framework and the topic that you're trying to learn at the same
time because it'll just make your learning experience much harder than it
needs to be and now we're at the final step which is to build the application
that you wanted to learn this topic for in the first place so for example if
you're learning node GS maybe you wanted to learn nodejs
because you wanted to create a new API for some kind of application that you're
running so now you can go ahead and build that API using node.js which you
just learned it'll be a difficult task because while you don't have a ton of
experience with this new topic that you learned you're going to run into a lot
of roadblocks and during this last step you're going to be referencing lots of
articles and tutorials for the many different robots that you run into
I also recommend on those smaller applications that you build to
constantly reference different documentation into
tutorials on the things that you get stuck on because you are going to get
stuck on tons of things so having those resources available will help make you
go through roadblocks so much quicker just make sure that you're not just
following tutorial for the entire application you want to build as much of
these applications by yourself so that you can actually go through the learning
process and thinking process and problem-solving process on your own
without relying on someone else doing the work for you that's why I only use
the tutorials when I get stuck on something and I can use them to break
through whatever roadblock I'm encountering
also if you are learning the technology but don't have an idea for an end goal
project that you want to learn it for just create any application that's a
little bit bigger than a small application and maybe incorporates a few
extra things that you wouldn't incorporate in the small application for
example maybe a database or react front-end to an application if you're
learning nodejs on the back end this will allow you to see how the different
parts interact together and give you a better understanding of how to use what
you're trying to learn overall and that's really all it takes to learn a
new topic by the time you finish building this medium-sized or larger
application you're going to have a fairly solid understanding of this topic
and be able to use it in future projects with no problem I would recommend though
in your learning process to spend more times in the first few steps of
researching and reading documentation because having a strong understanding of
what you're actually learning before you try to start learning it and
implementing it will make the implementation process so much easier
and make it easier to figure out where you should be using this technology as
opposed to other technologies in place of it so I really hope you guys learned
something in this video about how you can actually apply different techniques
to learn new topics quicker and more efficiently if you guys enjoyed the
video please make sure to subscribe to my channel for tutorials that may help
you in your learning process of certain technologies also let me know down in
the comments below what you are trying to learn and I may be able to create
tutorial videos about these different topics if they're popular enough so with
that thank you guys very much for watching and have a good day