The Rookie Coder

Do people RTFM to solve problems?

Hello,

I often do wonder, do people really Read the F**king Manual. As a child I learned that if I ever wanted to fully learn something I really had to read in depth on a particular topic. My first encounter with proper programming was Visual Basic 6. I still remember it well that I was holiday and I knew that if I didn’t read this book I would never be able to program (or what I called program an in showing and hiding various different windows).

That I think was when my penny first dropped and then later in college I often become angered when things would not work out, then I would realize that I have breached my own rule…. read before you start.

Reading before you start can really lead into bigger things though like your ability to be able to solve your own problems rather then squeal for help. From of a perspective of a lecturer(not that I am one, I am merely saying this is how I guess they view it), when a student asks for a lot of help, to them they are the student that is excelling rather then the person who kept quiet and has solved their own problem.

Many of my lectures have always told me before that “If nobody asks questions, that means nobody is doing any work”. I view that comment from a different side because when I am in class I rarely asked questions, even when I didn’t understand the problem I still didn’t ask any questions to me that would be cheating myself rather then taking the Problem Based Learning approach and RFTM.