Second best thing

It was not until last year that I have discovered reading books is the ultimate way to learn things fast. If you don't read, you can't know, and if you don't know, it looks difficult. From then on I am on a reading frenzy. This helped quite a lot and I read books/papers mainly on C programming, CPU architectures, and FPGAs. End of last year I could read a bit of OS books.

It was also last year that I discovered things aren't as difficult as they seemed. If you don't know, it looks difficult. But it actually isn't, after you understand it. Maybe its complicated/detailed, but its not "that clever" as it seemed. If you have a certain level of understanding things, its your short term memory that is the limiting factor, not how cleverly things are designed. In fact, the more complicated a design is, the less well-designed it is. Anyway, this is a topic of another post maybe.

Now I think apart from learning by reading, one other thing that helps a lot is to ask questions. Even if you're going to look stupid with your question, you should ask it. You should ask and ask, in various subjects in various mailing lists - just make good use of your question asking bandwidth. A Chinese phrase: "If you ask, you're stupid for once, if you don't, you're stupid forever." I think its very true. The 20 unknown things you asked this month won't bother your mind the next month and the one after. Its really a relief. I think I look fairly stupid when I ask various simple things that simply don't make sense for me. It has happened many times, and I used to be conservative in asking such questions, but I really don't care anymore and shouldn't. What matters is that you _learn_.