It’s incredibly difficult task to master/learn an old technology or an old concept that aren’t documented well. For an example, parser algorithms are very well known for being too verbose and unnecessarily over-complicated in documentation, if you ask anyone you know in the programming community, for the next 100 people, they wouldn’t know how to implement LALR parser or Earley parser even if they graduate from university with a computer science degree.
One of the way I use to learn a concept is writing a full manual of it in LaTeX in a way that I am explaining every single aspect of it to a layman and how it can be implemented in every way as well as providing examples in C code forms. It’s a bit interesting that you sometime learn better by trying to teach it to a made up audience when writing a manual.
Example page from a book I’m current writing in rough draft:
2: Learning new technologies
It’s incredibly difficult task to master/learn an old technology or an old concept that aren’t documented well. For an example, parser algorithms are very well known for being too verbose and unnecessarily over-complicated in documentation, if you ask anyone you know in the programming community, for the next 100 people, they wouldn’t know how to implement LALR parser or Earley parser even if they graduate from university with a computer science degree.
One of the way I use to learn a concept is writing a full manual of it in LaTeX in a way that I am explaining every single aspect of it to a layman and how it can be implemented in every way as well as providing examples in C code forms. It’s a bit interesting that you sometime learn better by trying to teach it to a made up audience when writing a manual.
Example page from a book I’m current writing in rough draft:
spoiler