
Want to lose weight study IT on your own? Ask me how
There is an opinion that I often encounter - it’s impossible to learn on your own, you need professionals who will lead you along this thorny path - to explain, verify, control. I’ll try to refute this statement, and for this, as you know, it’s enough to give at least one counterexample. There are such examples in history of the great autodidacts (or simply self-taught): the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822–1890) or the pride of Georgia - the artist Niko Pirosmani (1862–1918). Yes, these people lived, studied and created for the most part in the 19th century and were extremely far from the world of information technology. However, “the most important goal of learning is still learning to learn,” as Aristotle said. In this article I will share with you practical examples that allow you to effectively organize an independent educational process.

You can still learn on your own. Moreover, it is quite possible to achieve high results. You will be surprised: how can a person from the sphere of commercial education (I work in the training center " Network Academy LANIT ") talk on this subject, filed the branch on which he sits. However, let's take it in order.
I am a person who has been working in the field of education all my professional life (and this is more than 17 years): I am in education and I am for education. And I want to share practical examples with you that allow you to effectively organize an independent educational process. These techniques are a summary of my personal experience. Of course, I do not pretend to be the ultimate truth. But if each of you finds for yourself at least one technique that he wants to use in his personal practice, I will consider my task completed.
My first advice is if you decide to engage in self-education (no matter how much time you are ready to devote to this: 10 minutes, an hour, a day ...), try to avoid other things at this time to make it as effective as possible.
Hol Pashler, a professor at the University of California Psychology, said: “Even the brain of a Harvard graduate will become the brain of an eight-year-old child if you make him do two things at once.
Refuse multitasking when learning, and you will get the maximum effect from education.
But I promised to share practical tricks. I will illustrate these self-education techniques on the topic of front-end development. Firstly, this topic is insanely interesting to me myself (even from the moment when I worked as a school teacher of computer science and taught it to children). Secondly, the front-end development area is one of the most popular and rapidly developing areas ( see official statistics) Well, and thirdly, even if we are not front-end developers, we are consumers of the results of their work.
So, we need to independently acquire new knowledge and acquire practical skills. Where do you get them from? What is the source for you? Internet, textbooks and other people - right? So let's get started on the Internet.
There are tons of search sites. Different search engines have different search algorithms. As a result, a different area of coverage - each covers (or in a more technical language, indexes) part of the information present on the Internet. Therefore, you need to use different search engines to get the maximum coverage of sources.
But how to organize a search so as not to drown in a huge amount of "information noise"? You need to learn how to select healthy grains. Yes, now search engines perceive queries in a natural language. Algorithms for releasing relevant search query results are constantly being improved. Search engines acquire a huge set of additional features. But the question “How to look for information effectively?” Remains relevant to this day.
Almost every search engine has an advanced search and the query language on which it is built. But not everyone uses this opportunity on a regular basis.
I'll show you an example of Google. If I want to learn front-end development, I'm interested in technologies that I should pay attention to, and resources that are worth reading.

You can also use special characters or words to refine your searches . These simple tricks will help you get a more relevant issue and save a ton of time spent searching for quality information.
Now, probably, everyone knows about MOOC - mass education available on the Internet for everyone. Among the most famous venues are Coursera , Udemy , edX , Khan Academy , Fun MOOC . Most of these resources contain courses in English, but there are also Russian-language ones - for example, Stepik (where, by the way, Sberbank Corporate University places its courses).
In my personal charts, the undisputed leader is Udacity- for a professional approach and attracting experts from the industry. Often I also use Coursera - they have something that is not available on other resources, for example, cross-checks. This is an opportunity not only to receive comments from other users, but also to get involved in the process and act as an expert (this is also one of the methods of self-education, and I will talk about it later).
In my personal opinion, Russian platforms are still slightly inferior to foreign ones both in the quality of the material and in the form of delivery to the listener, but if you answer “Yes,” to the question “Do you speak English?”, This is also an excellent option.

Consider the search algorithm for the desired program using the Udacity example .
If you are a beginner specialist and do not know in what order you need to build training, what courses to take, what tasks are worth solving, then you can enroll in the so-called. "Comprehensive programs." Specialists in the field of training have already built the entire educational trajectory, it remains only to follow it.

How to understand which of the courses found is better? There is no universal recipe, it all depends on the goals, objectives and qualities of a particular person. However, I can give some recommendations.
By collecting these factors, you can determine for yourself whether it is worth taking this course.
Another common question is related to self-organization - a maximum of 8% of students reach the end of online courses. People are looking for solutions to specific problems drop training as soon as they are found. Another reason is the duration of the course. Most people are sprinters by nature, and it’s hard to run a long distance.
If you still want to graduate, first of all, develop in yourself those qualities that self-education requires:
Also, the problem of self-organization is successfully solved when regular and final reporting is required to management or other persons. A certification system also works, but only in cases where there is a need to confirm the status.
Look for people whose knowledge and experience you can rely on. People from the industry who have established themselves as highly qualified professionals who are ready to share their experience openly and free of charge. Do you think this is fantastic and this does not happen? It happens. There are a couple of tricks that you can use to find such people.
Refer to official sources - for example, organizations that develop standards. They have working groups created to develop specialized content. And information about them, as a rule, is publicly available.
Let's look at a specific example.

Usually, experts in this field willingly share their developments. You can find recordings of their performances, get acquainted with the list of resources that they used, see the slides and even the code that they demonstrated. And learn from their example.
By the way, I especially recommend Lea Verou - she has a lot of "tasty" developments that she puts in the public domain. She inspires a huge number of people around the world with her example. And I am no exception.
The second way to search for experts is video hosting, where you can find recordings of conferences on the topic. This is YouTube or Vimeo , which is not so widely known in our country , where a lot of materials are stored, which on YouTube sometimes simply do not exist.
And again on an example:
So you can find professionals in the right field and gain access to their best practices.

Here, my advice is very simple and even somewhat controversial in our era of Big Brother - leave “digital traces”:
And on the "digital footsteps" they will be given suggestions related to the topic of interest to you. This is an opportunity to enter the professional community, where you can find useful information and practical examples.
It is believed that with the availability of information on the Internet and countless online courses, reading books ceases to be relevant. However, this is fundamentally wrong.
Books are necessary to get a three-dimensional look at certain concepts, ideas, problems and technologies. They broaden their horizons and are intended for in-depth study of the material.
However, reading should also be effective.
For theoretical research, there are standards , regulations, etc.
If we are talking about technical literature, then I am guided by simple logic - I use the recommendations of authoritative sources. By them I mean recognized experts from the industry (many of whom I follow on Twitter ), as well as reputable electronic publications and specialized portals (for example, A Book Apart , O'Reilly Media , Smashing Magazine , CSS-Tricks ).
In general, I prefer practice-oriented sources. In this case, it is very important for me:
Here are some examples of books that I definitely recommend:
“I only remember what my hands do” - this is how the principle of learning “Learning by Doing”, known in the world of pedagogical practice, can be interpreted.
Sooner or later, you will need to somehow fix all the accumulated knowledge in practice. You need to constantly train - to find special tools that will allow you to organize such training most effectively.
Where to get these tools?
Relying on one of the previous paragraphs - with experts who share their work tools - you can find in their blogs and on sites where they publish their materials, interesting projects. These projects allow in practice to work out the new technologies you are studying, work methods, and develop your own know-how. And there are a lot of them.
In animation, for example, the change in the animated property over time is described by a certain curve, or rather, by a set of its parameters (coefficients). The most realistic, from the viewer's point of view, animation effects proceed non-linearly in time (it is enough to get acquainted with the principles of animation laid down by Walt Disney to make sure of this). For example, an object begins to move gradually, then its speed increases, then it gradually begins to decrease, etc. Mathematically, these dependencies are described using Bezier curves.
Take a look at the Cubic-Bezier interactive simulator (Bezier Curve), where you can clearly see how the shape of the curve affects the nature of the animation of moving an object in space. The algorithm is as follows:

More interesting examples:
I will dwell in more detail on a couple of the most significant, from my point of view.
Task: it is necessary that the form field used to enter the user password, as possible values, accept only sequences of at least 6 characters in length, containing at least one digit, letter (regardless of its case) and any character. The check should be performed on the user side using standard browser tools (for this purpose, the pattern attribute of the input field is used , whose value is a regular expression).
The sequence of actions :

Sequencing:

The main idea is to use various tools that are freely available on the websites of specialists and allow you to hone your skills completely free of charge.
After you have filled your hand, go to a new level - become an expert yourself.
How to do it? Easy.
Remember the tale about the teacher: “I told them three times, I already understood everything myself, but they won’t understand”? You need to transmit your knowledge in order to consolidate it. And as a tool, I suggest using the StackOverflow service. This is a specially created resource where developers are looking for answers to their professional questions. And they are answered by the same people - developers. This is how an extensive database of problems gathers, each of which has a solution. And you can become the author of the answers to these questions, understanding a particular topic and sharing your experience.
You kill two birds with one stone: first, you yourself learn to solve this problem. Secondly, learn to talk about the solution algorithm and thereby more securely consolidate new knowledge in memory.
Workflow at https://stackoverflow.com/

Or:
Do not forget about Stack Exchange - a network of websites for working with questions and answers in various fields, as well as the domestic resource Toaster (thanks, sfi0zy , for the tip).
I shared with you a few simple tricks that will help you “learn how to learn” and make the process of self-education more effective:
You might think: why then do we need training centers?
I will answer:

You can still learn on your own. Moreover, it is quite possible to achieve high results. You will be surprised: how can a person from the sphere of commercial education (I work in the training center " Network Academy LANIT ") talk on this subject, filed the branch on which he sits. However, let's take it in order.
I am a person who has been working in the field of education all my professional life (and this is more than 17 years): I am in education and I am for education. And I want to share practical examples with you that allow you to effectively organize an independent educational process. These techniques are a summary of my personal experience. Of course, I do not pretend to be the ultimate truth. But if each of you finds for yourself at least one technique that he wants to use in his personal practice, I will consider my task completed.
My first advice is if you decide to engage in self-education (no matter how much time you are ready to devote to this: 10 minutes, an hour, a day ...), try to avoid other things at this time to make it as effective as possible.
Hol Pashler, a professor at the University of California Psychology, said: “Even the brain of a Harvard graduate will become the brain of an eight-year-old child if you make him do two things at once.
Refuse multitasking when learning, and you will get the maximum effect from education.
But I promised to share practical tricks. I will illustrate these self-education techniques on the topic of front-end development. Firstly, this topic is insanely interesting to me myself (even from the moment when I worked as a school teacher of computer science and taught it to children). Secondly, the front-end development area is one of the most popular and rapidly developing areas ( see official statistics) Well, and thirdly, even if we are not front-end developers, we are consumers of the results of their work.
So, we need to independently acquire new knowledge and acquire practical skills. Where do you get them from? What is the source for you? Internet, textbooks and other people - right? So let's get started on the Internet.
1. Search efficiently
There are tons of search sites. Different search engines have different search algorithms. As a result, a different area of coverage - each covers (or in a more technical language, indexes) part of the information present on the Internet. Therefore, you need to use different search engines to get the maximum coverage of sources.
But how to organize a search so as not to drown in a huge amount of "information noise"? You need to learn how to select healthy grains. Yes, now search engines perceive queries in a natural language. Algorithms for releasing relevant search query results are constantly being improved. Search engines acquire a huge set of additional features. But the question “How to look for information effectively?” Remains relevant to this day.
Almost every search engine has an advanced search and the query language on which it is built. But not everyone uses this opportunity on a regular basis.
I'll show you an example of Google. If I want to learn front-end development, I'm interested in technologies that I should pay attention to, and resources that are worth reading.
- Go to the Advanced Search page .
- We set the parameters. For example:
a. with the phrase: Front-end Development,
b. with any of the words: 2018,
c. Search in: English,
d. Country: United States,
e. Update date: last year,
f. Word layout: in the page title. - Click Find.
- And on the search results page, we select those resources that will serve us as a starting point in the study of the topic.

You can also use special characters or words to refine your searches . These simple tricks will help you get a more relevant issue and save a ton of time spent searching for quality information.
2. Learn online
Now, probably, everyone knows about MOOC - mass education available on the Internet for everyone. Among the most famous venues are Coursera , Udemy , edX , Khan Academy , Fun MOOC . Most of these resources contain courses in English, but there are also Russian-language ones - for example, Stepik (where, by the way, Sberbank Corporate University places its courses).
In my personal charts, the undisputed leader is Udacity- for a professional approach and attracting experts from the industry. Often I also use Coursera - they have something that is not available on other resources, for example, cross-checks. This is an opportunity not only to receive comments from other users, but also to get involved in the process and act as an expert (this is also one of the methods of self-education, and I will talk about it later).
In my personal opinion, Russian platforms are still slightly inferior to foreign ones both in the quality of the material and in the form of delivery to the listener, but if you answer “Yes,” to the question “Do you speak English?”, This is also an excellent option.

Consider the search algorithm for the desired program using the Udacity example .
- Go to the course catalog - Catalog
- Select a category: Category - Programming and Development
- We set the filter "free": Type - Free Courses
- Specify your level: Skill Level - for example, Beginner
- Clarify the skills we want to hone: Skill - HTML, CSS, JavaScript
- And we get a list of courses that you can sign up for absolutely free. Their advantage is that most of them are developed with the participation of vendors, and training takes place on real projects.
If you are a beginner specialist and do not know in what order you need to build training, what courses to take, what tasks are worth solving, then you can enroll in the so-called. "Comprehensive programs." Specialists in the field of training have already built the entire educational trajectory, it remains only to follow it.
How to search for such programs
- Go to the section with continuing education programs (Nanodegree)
- Through the School of Programming we find the direction we need: Front-end Web Developer .

How to understand which of the courses found is better? There is no universal recipe, it all depends on the goals, objectives and qualities of a particular person. However, I can give some recommendations.
- Read reviews to get other people's opinions.
- To get acquainted with the Intro of the course, which describes the content, structure, techniques, fragments are presented, according to which you can evaluate how professional the approach to developing the course is, whether the teacher presents the material, what additional mechanisms of self-control or automatic control by the system are.
By collecting these factors, you can determine for yourself whether it is worth taking this course.
Another common question is related to self-organization - a maximum of 8% of students reach the end of online courses. People are looking for solutions to specific problems drop training as soon as they are found. Another reason is the duration of the course. Most people are sprinters by nature, and it’s hard to run a long distance.
If you still want to graduate, first of all, develop in yourself those qualities that self-education requires:
- learn to plan time;
- Find yourself the right motive;
- invite friends to join you in training so that you can discuss and analyze what you’ve learned.
Also, the problem of self-organization is successfully solved when regular and final reporting is required to management or other persons. A certification system also works, but only in cases where there is a need to confirm the status.
3. Look for experts
Look for people whose knowledge and experience you can rely on. People from the industry who have established themselves as highly qualified professionals who are ready to share their experience openly and free of charge. Do you think this is fantastic and this does not happen? It happens. There are a couple of tricks that you can use to find such people.
Refer to official sources - for example, organizations that develop standards. They have working groups created to develop specialized content. And information about them, as a rule, is publicly available.
Let's look at a specific example.
- Go to the website of the World Wide Web Consortium
- Going to Working Groups - Working Groups
- Among them, we choose the one that is currently of interest to us. For example, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).
- We move to the category of participants and get access to all organizations involved in the development of these standards: Participants
- We find invited experts - specialists who are recognized by the international community. Invited Experts: Rachel Andrew , Lea Verou

Usually, experts in this field willingly share their developments. You can find recordings of their performances, get acquainted with the list of resources that they used, see the slides and even the code that they demonstrated. And learn from their example.
By the way, I especially recommend Lea Verou - she has a lot of "tasty" developments that she puts in the public domain. She inspires a huge number of people around the world with her example. And I am no exception.
The second way to search for experts is video hosting, where you can find recordings of conferences on the topic. This is YouTube or Vimeo , which is not so widely known in our country , where a lot of materials are stored, which on YouTube sometimes simply do not exist.
And again on an example:
- We go to YouTube. Search: frontend conference
- Effective search also works here, and you should not neglect it. Choose: Filters → Channels
- And we get a list of channels dedicated to this topic.
- For example: Front-Trends → Playlists → Front-Trends 2017
- Choose any speaker. Say, Una Kravets - she is a great expert who has a lot to learn.
- Voila.
So you can find professionals in the right field and gain access to their best practices.

4. Make artificial intelligence work for you
Here, my advice is very simple and even somewhat controversial in our era of Big Brother - leave “digital traces”:
- Subscribe to channels to be offered "similar";
- “Like” and save videos and materials in bookmarks;
- Subscribe to the pages of professional communities of interest to you in social networks.
And on the "digital footsteps" they will be given suggestions related to the topic of interest to you. This is an opportunity to enter the professional community, where you can find useful information and practical examples.
5. Read books
It is believed that with the availability of information on the Internet and countless online courses, reading books ceases to be relevant. However, this is fundamentally wrong.
Books are necessary to get a three-dimensional look at certain concepts, ideas, problems and technologies. They broaden their horizons and are intended for in-depth study of the material.
However, reading should also be effective.
How to choose books to read?
For theoretical research, there are standards , regulations, etc.
If we are talking about technical literature, then I am guided by simple logic - I use the recommendations of authoritative sources. By them I mean recognized experts from the industry (many of whom I follow on Twitter ), as well as reputable electronic publications and specialized portals (for example, A Book Apart , O'Reilly Media , Smashing Magazine , CSS-Tricks ).
In general, I prefer practice-oriented sources. In this case, it is very important for me:
- so that the language of presentation is simple and humanized (I like books-interlocutors, where questions are asked, the thought is disturbed during reading),
- quality of the finished material. Of course, the content is more valuable. But the wrapper allows us to draw a conclusion about the attitude that was put into the book, gives an idea of the time and effort spent on giving the book life, about finding the right way for the author (and the whole involved team) to express themselves through the book. As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. And I really notice them.
Here are some examples of books that I definitely recommend:
- Andy Clarke. Art Direction for the Web
- Lea Verou. CSS Secrets: Better Solutions to Everyday Web Design Problems
- Adam Wathan, Steve Schoger. Refactoring UI
- Heydon Pickering. Inclusive Design Patterns
6. Use different tools
“I only remember what my hands do” - this is how the principle of learning “Learning by Doing”, known in the world of pedagogical practice, can be interpreted.
Sooner or later, you will need to somehow fix all the accumulated knowledge in practice. You need to constantly train - to find special tools that will allow you to organize such training most effectively.
Where to get these tools?
Relying on one of the previous paragraphs - with experts who share their work tools - you can find in their blogs and on sites where they publish their materials, interesting projects. These projects allow in practice to work out the new technologies you are studying, work methods, and develop your own know-how. And there are a lot of them.
In animation, for example, the change in the animated property over time is described by a certain curve, or rather, by a set of its parameters (coefficients). The most realistic, from the viewer's point of view, animation effects proceed non-linearly in time (it is enough to get acquainted with the principles of animation laid down by Walt Disney to make sure of this). For example, an object begins to move gradually, then its speed increases, then it gradually begins to decrease, etc. Mathematically, these dependencies are described using Bezier curves.
Take a look at the Cubic-Bezier interactive simulator (Bezier Curve), where you can clearly see how the shape of the curve affects the nature of the animation of moving an object in space. The algorithm is as follows:
- Customize ( leverage )
- Set animation time to 1.5–2 seconds
- Run the test - creates the correct animation effect: there is preparation for the beginning of the action, the action itself and inertia upon completion.

More interesting examples:
I will dwell in more detail on a couple of the most significant, from my point of view.
- Verify RegExplained playground password requirements :
Task: it is necessary that the form field used to enter the user password, as possible values, accept only sequences of at least 6 characters in length, containing at least one digit, letter (regardless of its case) and any character. The check should be performed on the user side using standard browser tools (for this purpose, the pattern attribute of the input field is used , whose value is a regular expression).
The sequence of actions :
- /^.{6,►$$ - any 6 characters
- /^(?=.*\d).{6,}$/ - of which at least one digit
- /^(?=.*\d)(?=.*►azaz).{6,►$$/i - at least one letter from them (case is not important)
- /^(?=.*\d)(?=.*[az.BIZ)(?=.*[\W_†).{6,►$$i - at least one character from them (not a letter or a number )

- Another example is the CSS3 Patterns Gallery : it's amazing how the code turns into a geometric pattern!
Sequencing:
- Scale 90%
- Zig-zag - background code

The main idea is to use various tools that are freely available on the websites of specialists and allow you to hone your skills completely free of charge.
7. Become an expert
After you have filled your hand, go to a new level - become an expert yourself.
How to do it? Easy.
Remember the tale about the teacher: “I told them three times, I already understood everything myself, but they won’t understand”? You need to transmit your knowledge in order to consolidate it. And as a tool, I suggest using the StackOverflow service. This is a specially created resource where developers are looking for answers to their professional questions. And they are answered by the same people - developers. This is how an extensive database of problems gathers, each of which has a solution. And you can become the author of the answers to these questions, understanding a particular topic and sharing your experience.
You kill two birds with one stone: first, you yourself learn to solve this problem. Secondly, learn to talk about the solution algorithm and thereby more securely consolidate new knowledge in memory.
Workflow at https://stackoverflow.com/
- Drive a query into the search field - for example: CSS
- As a result, we have the issue of all questions with the tag "CSS"
- Go to the Unanswered - Unanswered tab. And we get a wide field for activity

Or:
- https://en.stackoverflow.com/
- Tags
- We follow the same scenario.
Do not forget about Stack Exchange - a network of websites for working with questions and answers in various fields, as well as the domestic resource Toaster (thanks, sfi0zy , for the tip).
Summary
I shared with you a few simple tricks that will help you “learn how to learn” and make the process of self-education more effective:
- Search efficiently.
- Learn from massive online courses (and complete them).
- Look for experts from whom you could borrow experience, with whom you can talk and consult.
- Use the capabilities of artificial intelligence: leave "digital traces" so that it works for you, expanding your professional circle and horizons.
- Read books. Just approach their choice consciously. Those whose authors ask you questions and stimulate your mental work will be most suitable. Do not forget about the aesthetic component: reading should provide not only intellectual pleasure.
- Train with a variety of tools that can be found with experts. And don't be afraid to experiment.
- Finally, become an expert yourself in order to put the accumulated knowledge into practice.
You might think: why then do we need training centers?
I will answer:
Jobs are open at Network Academy!