“My school uses Linux almost exclusively in the undergraduate
labs, yet my experience with Linux wasn’t gained there. It is a
bit disheartening when one realizes that spending 15 hours a week
in class isn’t teaching you as much as spending 5 hours on the
weekend playing with Linux. How could this be? I began to
question whether it was simply my individual learning style that
was a factor or whether there was something else going on
here….”
“I noticed it wasn’t so much the material as my attitudes
towards how it was presented and what I was allowed to do with it.
Learning Linux and programming on my own let me learn things
non-linearly, and at my own pace. If I write a program that isn’t
exactly correct, the world won’t end, I’ll just fix the problems
and probably learn something in the process. If I trash my Linux
partition, I’ll probably learn twice as much attempting to fix
it.”
“The key words I seemed to be coming across were playing and
exploration. Another factor to consider was how fast and easy it
was to get a technical question answered on the Internet. Usually,
I didn’t even have to ask it, because it was asked three years ago
and is archived on Usenet or in a mailing list archive.”