Drills Explainer
These drills are designed to literally stop you in your tracks if you try to move to the next lesson before you learned everything in this lesson.
- Read here if you want some clarity on why you will be using Unit Testing to drill.
- Read here for Installaion Instructions
What To Expect From Any Drill
- Drills are designed to conform to exactly what is covered in a lesson.
- Drills are designed to re run repetitively until they are second nature.
- Sometimes instructions on how to complete a drill can be confusing. Sorting out the meaning of the instructions is an important part of the work of these drills.
Example: A new coder might watch an early lesson and feel that everything Trevor is teaching makes sense and that he understands it. Then he does the drill and immediately confused by instructions to "declare a variable" or "invoke a method" thinking "WTH does that mean?"
Only by going back to that or even a previous lesson and watching it until he observes Trevor saying "declare a variable" can the new coder put the pieces together. "Oh, that's what 'declare a variable' means!"
How Long Should It Take?
If you have never even coded before, and Trevor's lessons are not sinking in, the first time you do these drills might feel like forever. But here's the good news. You'll pay that price once, because if you stick to thd drill's regimen, this painful period will be a one time proposition. After that, you'll begin to move at a more timely pace.
The most important aspect of these drills is straightforward. Never go to the next lesson until this lesson's drills can be done 10 times in a row at top speed with minimal effort.
As you begin to move through the drills, it still might take an hour or more to do the drill the first time, depending on how carefully you were able to pay attention while watching Trevor through that lesson.
Top speed for every drill after you get good at it won't be as fast as you can type, but maybe in a few minutes. Use stop watch on you mobile phone to time yourself! You'll discover what that top speed is!
The Absolute or "Never Again" Proposition
Each drill attempts to go absolutely hardcore with this very simple idea. Never Again shall any of these [well definded teachings from Trevor's lessons] cause confusion or ambiguity in your brain. Period. The End. That time is behind me, now.
Each drill documents very carefully exactly what this list is. Then, you are expected to drill and drill and drill and drill until there is no chance that you would ever forget pr be confused by ...
Generate and Complete the same Drill Until ...
- Repeat the process of generating and completing drills until you can do so full speed at least 10x in a row.
- Every generated drill is different, as a random name generator and random numbers are used.
More Specific Instructions
Each drill may or may not be accompanied with specific instruction sets, such as U2L03
Future Plans
The current version is already the 4th major version of these drills and still far from what we would like to see.
Future plans might or might not include:
- Continued addition of more and more drills
- Delivered in the form of an Eclipse Plugin with automatic refresh
- Easier to use
- [Your suggestion here]