If you know the basic principles of programming then you can always just search for 'how do I _____ in ______' and get your answer quickly.
Very true, however this only works for languages that are just like the languages you already know. So taking a mythical enterprise programmer (no hate mail, please!), he can google for "How do I implement a for loop in Scheme" and get an answer, but of course he may entirely miss the fact that tail recursion is optimized by default and that the idiomatic way to solve his problem would be to write a recursive function.
For this reason, I hope that when Googling things, people take the extra step of just plain reading words. Lots of words. Blog posts, books (online or dead trees), rants in forums, everything.
The limitation of asking a question (whether in Google or StackOverflow or whatever) is that when learning a new way to think about programming, you don't know what question to ask.
That extremely true, which is why I recommend not learning by Google as a default. Knowing what question to ask implies knowing things that relate to the issue.
The best way in my view to learn those related things is usually in a good book about the subject. I fail to see blogs/stack overflow/google ever beating a good book about a subject.
I grew up with 'learn by Googling' as my most used educational tool. It would have been wonderful if it didn't take so much time to sift through the endless misinformation, but doing so really leads to a pretty deep coverage of a topic. "Learning by Google" also often meant "Learning by perldoc" by proxy, or "Learning by O'Reilly e-books", etc. The real difficulty comes to when a subject is obscured by prominent shitty resourcess (Google, please blacklist w3schools.com, and please make the ACTUAL SPECS always turn up as the first result).
If you know the basic principles of programming then you can always just search for 'how do I _____ in ______' and get your answer quickly.
Very true, however this only works for languages that are just like the languages you already know. So taking a mythical enterprise programmer (no hate mail, please!), he can google for "How do I implement a for loop in Scheme" and get an answer, but of course he may entirely miss the fact that tail recursion is optimized by default and that the idiomatic way to solve his problem would be to write a recursive function.
For this reason, I hope that when Googling things, people take the extra step of just plain reading words. Lots of words. Blog posts, books (online or dead trees), rants in forums, everything.
The limitation of asking a question (whether in Google or StackOverflow or whatever) is that when learning a new way to think about programming, you don't know what question to ask.