Concentric Circles in Learning

When I was younger one of my least favorite cartoons was the Road Runner.  One of the main reasons that I did not like the cartoon because of Wile E. Coyote. In his effort in catching the Road Runner he never kept at it with the same tools, and always thought he had to try something new.

In the beginning of my learning to program journey, I tried everything. I tried a lot of languages before I finally settled on Ruby. I actually first started with C, but when that got boring I quickly jumped into to Ruby after spending a brief time in HTML/CSS, but years prior I attempted to learn JAVA with much failure.

I also tried a lot of different tools to learn Ruby and built up quite the backlog of things to complete, including books, videos, and course. My thought was to blow through each learning tool quick enough to learn the next, but I very rarely did things twice.

My entire outlook on learning has completely changed now that I work as a web dev, but I feel like it is for the better. I now spend more time on one learning resource at a time and actually find myself revisiting things I have already completed.

I heard of the term, Concentric Circles in Learning from a fellow Odinite, Afshin. The idea comes down to making your learning cyclical by repeating going through learning materials multiple times. My biggest complaint with Code School is that I did not understand the material the first time through. I then avoided learning Rails through the Rails for Zombie course, but when I revisited months later after completing a number of Rails Tutorials, it made much more sense.

One of the biggest recommendations I heard when going through the Rails Tutorial is to go through the same tutorial again. I met an individual at local meetup who loaned me a copy of the The Well-Grounded Rubyist after going through it 3 times. There is a lot of truth to learning more the second time around.

I now actual read books multiple times and repeat chapters as well as complete the problems in the book(Eloquent Javascript). I have been slowly working through Vim Adventures while running my test suite at work and feel VIM has become second nature because of it.

Before I felt like I was cramming for a test before an exam every time I learned something new, I now leisure read through material not worrying about capturing everything in my brain because I can always capture on my second of third time through.



I highly recommend going through resources multiple times and don't give up just take a break.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you re-read and run through videos multiple times or do you try things once?