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TOP down or bottom UP approach to Learning

      All of us have unique learning ability. Learning new thing has two of many approaches ( i.e TOP-DOWN or BOTTOM-UP ). TOP down approach is from Generalisation to Specialisation approach and BOTTOM up is inverse. Which approach to follow depends on the individuals choice and level of experience. In both the cases you can start small then broaden your learning and then narrow it down for easier storage and retrieval. Let's do a comparative analysis today of these approaches and understand which approach is better.     Learning something new requires lot of efforts and if you do it wrong then you tend to confuse yourself and lose confidence. Let's take an example of the BOTTOM up approach, if you are learning a new programming language and you start with the datatypes, reserved keywords, access specifiers, etc. then you will need more efforts to first store all what you learnt then club them together to create a logical whole. Most of us will argue s...

Concept is more important than Programming language constructs

     Programming languages are evolving faster in the Information Age. The rapid growth in the language features and new Programming languages being introduced in the market is overwhelming. It is difficult to keep up with this pace. Moreover organisations like Oracle which adopted 6 months release cycle using Agile process has given us very little time to learn new things and establish our stronghold. When I went through few of these Programming languages I found the usual pattern that conceptually they are very similar only the Programming construct is different. Hence I believe the concept is more important than Programming language construct.      Let's take an example of Groovy and Java 8. Both of these languages have the concept of lambda but the programming construct is different. In Groovy Programming language they call it Closure and in Java 8 they called it Lambda. The concept is same to pass code as an argument. The concept of code as an argument...