As I’m coming along in The Odin Project, I’m finding a number of things that I enjoy and that surprise me.  One of the surprises is that learning is progressing more slowly than I thought it would, in that I thought I would be able to get through everything quicker and just blaze through things.  This is not so much the case, especially with jQuery and rspec.  The other surprise and an enjoyable one at that, is the amount of community that is built up around programming and how helpful people want to be, I’m finding a ton of meetup groups and resources (as I’ve already posted about both earlier), but there is so much depth and breadth to the community and that is really refreshing.  I’m also figuring out more in depth my learning style is far more geared towards specific, modularized, and interactive/quickly repeatable examples.

I’m finding this because as I try more and more Codeschool.com, I’m figuring out that I really do not enjoy the style of 5-10 minute introduction video crammed with information, and then, here are some practice problems/code environments to work in.  Cramming and regurgitating for me is frustrating, as it makes notetaking far more tedious than it needs to be, because instead of spreading things out it forces me to pause the video every 15 seconds and then move on, instead of normal note taking where I would take something down, think about/comprehend it, and begin absorbing it.  I far prefer CodeAcademys’ method of small examples with an easily accessible forum and community to ask questions.  Both approach learning basic concepts and ideas in programming, but do so in different ways, one being more constructive and helpful than the other.