I feel like I spend more time reading than actually coding

Posted by Fun-Corner8617@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 12 comments

Hey everyone, I’m currently learning Flutter, and I honestly really like the framework. I can clearly see myself improving day by day. But whenever I start learning something new, like databases for instance, I end up spending a huge amount of time reading documentation and asking ChatGPT about the things I don’t understand.

Sometimes I spend a very long time just reading ChatGPT answers so I can fully understand even a simple query I wrote. I feel like reading and trying to understand things takes up around 80% of my study time, while actual coding only makes up 20%.

So I’m wondering: is this normal? Is this actually the right way to learn, or does it mean my learning curve is progressing too slowly? And is there maybe a more effective way to study that I can rely on?

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Rain-And-Coffee@reddit

This is completely normal.

You learn to understand what the library does, then try using it, and usually go back to the docs.

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ffrkAnonymous@reddit

After you read documentation,

and after you write your little bit of code,

don't forget to write your own documentation for your code to read later when you've forgotten what your code does.

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ApprehensiveFix5084@reddit

This seems correct. About the ratio for me, many years ago, when we had to read from books and ask people. The only thing that really changes is that AI doesn’t have limited office hours.

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mocompute@reddit

Not only will you spend more time reading other people's code and documentation, you'll spend more time reading your own code than writing it. This is the way.

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PhrosstBite@reddit

P sure many authors, as in novels, say the same. They spend a surprising amount of time reading, i.e. researching, editing, critically analyzing others works, etc. How else would you know what to write other than by reading as much as you can?

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RealNamek@reddit

Got to up those numbes rookie.

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Limp-Confidence5612@reddit

Completely normal. I started "working" on implementing a limited feature shell a month+ ago, and I have been only reading man pages, the POSIX standard, the bash manual, readline manual, flex and bison documentation to understand how bash actually does it's tokenization, lexing and parsing.

It feels like it never ends, and I have just been complaining to my wife that I feel like I'm wasting too much time on sidequests that are not directly relevant to the requirements of my project. But that's how I learn, I guess.

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Flame77ofc@reddit

practice more

Try to ask for AI to project Ideas You can't stay just on reading when u practice u are saying to your brain to remember

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