How to improve your SVG and programming skills

A couple of very simple tips, nothing transcendental, just good old plain commonsense:

 

 1) Do not practice fast reading any longer, unless you have that amazing gift that only few have, and which is totally different from reading fast, which means partially, skipping portions that you may inadvertently consider irrelevant/boring/not useful. There is no question that the trend is to get more information, quicker. That trend has been going on for too long now, and it’s destructive and not as informative as it pretends to be. Get less information and give yourself a minimum reasonable time to absorb it, in the end you’ll get more with less effort and less strain. Remember also that each two lines have an in between the lines; those can be read too, and are usually very instructive. That way you can have twice the value for money.
 

 2) Take the necessary time to make your research/selection (I know, that can wear you out), then focus on the selected material while not abusing of the hyperlink facility. In other words, study the material, by reading through attentively and several times, if necessary. Sounds like at school? Well, life “is” a school. For some domains like art and science, school never ends, learning is a curse.
 

 3) Contrary to a common belief, reinventing the wheel is necessary, otherwise we would still have car races on stone wheels (I guess that would be extremely funny to watch). But make sure at least that you’re not attempting to reinvent an existing one; no, you have to invent a “new” new one, unless you want to do it as an exercise, which is a very good learning practice. Moral: look around and in the right places. I hear your question “Which are the right places?”. Well, surprisingly enough I do have an answer: for starters, start at the starting point. Where’s that? You’re asking me where’s that? You’re right on it! Do the following and you’ll have lots of fun and “revelations”: go back in the history of messages at the beginning of time (SVG time, not UTC time); read the posts that interest you, say, ten a day, and in a couple of months you’ll know how to do anything, and solve any SVG issue you may have; you’ll see instructive discussions (even some instructive disputes) , issue solving, demos and cool works (some of which  have been remade later for no reason by many who haven’t done this work I’m suggesting, while thinking they were inventing a wheel). I guarantee you’ll be on your ass. Some resources might be down after this long, but many are still there. Take this as a study and it will pay back. And don’t worry, it will not prevent you from exploring other resources on the web.
 

 4) The SVG specification should be you companion. It was generally very well written (I never had any problems with it, but you know, some people always think they can do better, with the objective of satisfying the needs of some lazy ones). Of course it’s big. At the beginning I had trouble with acquiring the mass of material. In the end I must have read it I don’t know how many times, but when you love you don’t count the cost.
 

 Domenico Strazzullo