Book Review: Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your Wetware

The Pragmatic Programmers have consistently put out good material for years, and whether their own or other authors', the quality is almost always high. I just finished Pragmatic Thinking and Learning and, reading numerous other reviews, they are all very positive. The community liked it, and that's usually a good sign (we'll see what happens when not everyone is happy).

Important Relationships

The first major concept introduced, and repeatedly referenced, is that the relationships between objects are more interesting than the objects themselves. Discrete "things" - whether facts, concepts, or people, exist not in a vacuum but with other similar and different "things." Emergent behaviors and ideas spring up with the interactions between everything in their specific system. These specific contexts generate yet more powerful versions of the what is interacting in them.

A non-programming example is opening a locked door. The situation of why one wants to open the door matters in how one will attempt to open the door. Whether there is a baby in a burning house with a locked front door or there are documents we want to steal in a hotel room under security will influence the method used - an axe or lock picking tools. The why strongly influences the how and context matters.

Got Skills?

We then turn to the Dreyfus Model for Skill Acquisition and see how people learn new topics. Starting as a novice, one who needs context-free rules, like recipes, because he doesn't know enough to establish any big picture of the problem domain, and ending as an expert who understands the system he works in so well he works by intuition and pattern matching, there is a trend from stricter rules to practically none. The greater the expertise, the more we understand what is possible and what we should consider, both giving us faster access to what is possible and a smaller, and more easily understood, problem.

Impr-you-vement

The methods for improving skills is simple but not easy. Only through deliberate practice can we get to the highest levels of understanding, and this involves a lot of well-structured, hard work. We need a system to work on well-defined tasks that are appropriately challenging, continuous feedback from those tasks to keep us working on relevant ideas, and lots of repetition to strengthen the ideas and make them part of our long-term memories.

It also helps to find the relationships between what we're learning, looking at the big picture to understand the overall meaning and not be bothered with the minute details (at least not at the beginning). Analogies to previous knowledge further create relationships and help establish the context of the new ideas. For example, when reading a non-fiction book, we should first scan the table of contents and chapter summaries to get an overview of what we're going to read to establish the most ideas to focus on. While reading we should summarize the concepts, create metaphors with the material, and, when finished, expand the notes with a reread and discuss the ideas with colleagues. These tactics will cement the knowledge in the brain better than just a cursory skimming of the book.

Nothing is Perfect, However

One weakness of the book is the reliance on the left/right brain dichotomy, an idea that isn't totally backed by science. This criticism goes as deep as one wants to rely on the truth of this assertion, but if we think of it as a metaphor, like the main brain metaphor of a computer (another incomplete metaphor), and always remember that it's just a method to point in the general direction of understanding, and that we shouldn't understand these concepts to be almost literally accurate, we can get away with the comparisons. Regardless, I'm sure there is value in the takeaways such as creating analogies between disparate topics, drawing out ideas, talking out loud, and using other mixed media.

So What?

Pragmatic Learning is an excellent book, faults and all, and I did take away some concrete plans.

• I've created a wiki for knowledge dumps and connecting ideas
• I'm researching mind mapping software (either this one or this one)
• I'm writing down my ideas in a notebook, along with notes on books I'm reading, which I then transfer to an online medium

There are dozens of other specific tasks to do, and I plan to come back to the book and implement more as needed. It's certainly not necessary to try every single one, but it is reasonable, if the motivation is there (and who wouldn't want to learn how to learn better?), the results will follow.