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Learning Never Stops
Keep developing yourself
Issue: 9.1 (November/December 2010)
Author Bio: Bob is the owner of BKeeney Software. In addition to providing REALbasic consulting, he provides REALbasic training videos (currently over 20 hours worth), and sells software to consumers and developers. He is the current President of the Association of REALbasic Professionals.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 3,907
Starting Page Number: 84
Article Number: 9110
Related Link(s): None
Excerpt of article text...
It's easy to keep doing the same thing over and over again. We all do this because it's... well... easy. For many of us our jobs paint us into a corner and it's rare to come out of it because we tend to become experts in an area and once we're an expert we don't venture out very much. It's part of human nature.
Being a REALbasic developer is no different. Many of us have spent years learning the ins and outs of REALbasic but only in certain areas. You might be an expert at cross-platform database applications, but you might not know much about the email, XML, or StyledText classes. It happens.
You're really missing out, though. REALbasic is huge! I bet there are classes you've never used or features in the IDE that you've never come across. How do I know this? When I started doing the video training series on BKeeney.com I started to stretch my knowledge because I had to. Presenting something (i.e., teaching) requires a thorough understanding of the material.
I have about two hours of free videos on my website that are simply IDE walkthroughs. You'd think that after nearly ten years of REALbasic development I would know almost everything there is to know in the IDE. I learned a lot of new things creating just those two hours of video because it forced me to look at everything in detail so I could talk about it intelligently.
For the subscription series I went even farther. I took each control and looked at each property and most of the major events and tried to use it in a real world example. I then played with it in Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. Guess what? I learned tons of little things that make my own and client applications better. I discovered some bugs and some workarounds. All in all it was an awesome experience.
The experience has opened me up to use new classes, new controls, and new techniques. It has let me explore some of those areas that I've always wanted to try but haven't had the time or inclination to do so. I recently did some work in the networking and serial classes and I'll admit that it was a huge learning curve since I had never worked with them. I can guarantee you that the lessons learned will eventually make it into a video.
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