A Serious Set Of Skills

I am pondering broadening some of my skills.  Partly this is down to some hyper-intelligent friends who are all dripping in degrees, Masters, and PhDs.  But partly it's about trying not to lose a fundamental ability to learn new stuff.  I don't want to become one of those people who insists that they can't get their head around something before even attempting it, just because the thing in question is new, or looks difficult or intimidating.

So I thought I'd have a bit of a poke around the internet and see what the current thinking was if you wanted to learn how to program computers.  First of all I figured it might be best to find out what the word was in Operating Systems, and since that led to a lot of discussion on what was the best to use rather than the best to learn, I started again.  And I found this page that, in line with my last blog about how something is written can inspire trust in the author, makes me seriously doubt that the writer knows anything about computers at all.  This is my favourite bit:

You have to know certain types of words that are to be used on the computer like the words troubleshoot you got to know what that means. Troubleshooting is when you fix a problem that's why it's one of the important words on the computer like if you can't go on the internet and you had seen the word troubleshoot and you don't know what it means, you can mess up the whole network.

I might have to go and mess up the whole network if this is what passes for instruction these days.