The past few days at work, I’ve spent my time studying. Not building or coding anything, just cracking the Moock Actionscript book, along with the Object-Oriented Programming with Actionscript book I got, way back in July.
Earlier today, I was making decent progress. I understood most of the core concepts, and was following each example. Then, there’d be one thing I didn’t quite get. And as I kept reading, there’d be another thing that didn’t quite make sense. And then another.
It kept on like this until the pages began to seem like gibberish. I realize there’s a learning curve to this stuff, but right now I’m remembering why I hate studying (in particular, computer manuals). The grammar of a sentence is oftentimes difficult to decipher, to say nothing of the concepts that are being relayed in said sentence.
For good or bad, a lot of my coding experience I gained through direct work on projects. I’d look things up, sure, but I internalized a lot of things. There’s a great deal of vocabulary that I’m unfamiliar with (terms that are common across ALL programming langauges), and this is one of the hurdles I’m dealing with now.
On top of that, the notion of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is something I’m trying to wrap my head around. I sort of get it. I sort of don’t. Every time I think I get it, I read a little more and it makes me feel like I don’t get it again.
I realize this stuff takes time, and that my current frustrations will go away eventually. But for now, I just feel like a big doofus that can’t quite grok much of anything. I can code using Actionscript pretty well and can (and have) built some pretty complex things in my time. But right now, reading over these manuals, learning these new concepts, I feel like I don’t know my elbow from my ass.
