Learning with stackoverflow.com

The intended desire of SO (if I have listened correctly to Jeff and Joel's podcasts) is to build a reference for programming questions, where information will be accurate and remain accurate (which fits the wikipedia dimension advocated by their faq page).

However:

• how accurate they are, there is not enough incentive (in term of badge and/or points) to re-visit old questions with now inaccurate answers
• there can be no consolidation of those informations (scattered amongst many many questions, and amongst many answers representing different point of views, which is great) for a given technology field. That is by design and I do not criticize it.

So yes, it is a neat tool to pick some useful tips, but:

• it needs to evolve in order to update those informations (a 'question status change' can be one possible way to trigger those updates)
• the reader must not always take the highest up-voted or accepted answer for granted as the only "good" information: often other answers below as just as interesting or challenging ;)

That said, SO rocks, off course :)

Yes, reading information often produces learning. Sorry that I'm not more shocked - maybe I'm just tired.

It's been a long week of learning ;-)

An RSS feed of a specific tag can be quite useful for learning about a specific technology

It surely helps to learn a lot. You can easily answer questions and then find out somebody has a better way of doing the same thing. Or just read some questions related to the field[s] you are interested in and most of the time you'll find something interesting and new in the answers.

Excuse me for appearing dismissive :-) but it does sound like you have not been in an online programmer community before, or at least not any good one.

Yes, having focussed and productive programming-related discussion with other good programmers tends to produce immense growth for at least a couple of years. I know that spending some 4–5 years on Perl Monks made me an immeasurably better programmer than I was before. It doesn’t necessarily deepen your understanding of any one topic too greatly, but it brings you into contact with a broad range of issues in programming and related to programming, and with a variety of views about them, so it tends to round you out and train what Paul Graham would call your taste as a programmer.

That growth kind of tends to peter out after some time because participating in communities is most helpful in acquiring broadly applicable knowledge – once your broad-knowledge basis is well established, your interests tend to diversify and go into less explored niche areas. After that, you have to pick specific study materials and drill down into topics purposefully and deeply to continue growing.