For most construction related stuff: on the job with someone with 30+ years of experience. You can only learn it by doing it but it's good to have someone telling what you should and should not do.
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2026
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I work in tech and the best resource for learning how to work in tech is to be asked the stupidest question you could ever fucking possibly imagine by somebody that makes 17 times your annual salary.
Are you me?
Idk, probably.
Electrician in NA, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) has an apprenticeship program which is generally considered excellent. I doubt youd find much better training.
My son just graduated high school and wants to be an electrician. Any tips on getting in? Thanks!
Just apply! Availability is gonna depend on your local, I know mine has doubled its class size over the last few years. We're in high demand and young folks have realized it. But if he can show up, pay attention, and piss clean im sure he'll do fine.
Anything he can learn about basic electrical theory will definitely help, but its not strictly necessary. They'll teach him everything he needs to know. Still, being familiar with stuff like Ohm's Law wont hurt with the interview.
I believe the classes at my local start in September so it may take a while, but if he's patient its worth it. The union benefits are amazing, he'll be set for life and able to work pretty much anywhere he wants.
Meanwhile, if he can find a job as a helper he'll get valuable experience. Won't be a well-paying job, he'll be doing a lot of grunt work (up to and including literal ditch-digging) but itll give him a view of life outside the union and appreciate the IBEW more with any luck. He'll need some basic hand tools to start with (11-in-1 screwdriver, impact driver, lineman pliers, wire strippers, diagonal cutters, sharpie/pencil, razor knife and tape measure), but id suggest avoiding buying more power tools until he knows if hell be union or not. If he is, theyll provide them. If not, itll depend on his company. But a helper/apprentice shouldn't worry about anything beyond a drill for a few years.
Hope that helps! Feel free to ask any other questions and ill do my best to answer. Ive been in the trade about a decade and im self-employed currently.
Time. No matter what you do, putting in the hours of practice gives you the experience and exposure needed to get better. Whether it's art, music, tech, cooking, language, or whatever, there's truly no substitute for spending time.
Beyond that I think it's good to use a broad approach where you switch between variety of things like naive exploration, studying masters, theory education, etc. (It's no good to just study music theory, for example, you need to also be learning existing songs and playing around with your instrument in an intuitive way. I think the same concept can be applied to many other skills )
100% most progress in learning i did is when I was struggling the most. After a while something clicks in your head. And the more you learn the faster you can learn, because theres already bunch of stuff your brain can compare with.
I wish I had known this earlier in life, I was pretty smart kid at school who got lazy quick as stuff got harder and then had really tough time as a freshman in university.
Programming: The internet in general. But not AI.
Hobbies: Books.
Knitting: it really helps to start with an actual human teacher, but people can self-teach themselves using YouTube only. After you get the basics down, YouTube is great for learning a stitch you’ve never seen before. And that’s pretty much all you need to start reading patterns. Anytime you come across something you don’t understand, YouTube to the rescue. There is also a great community site called Ravelry for pattern discovery, discussion, and yarn information.
My mother learned to knit when pregnant with twins and waddled into a local store and said ”Hello I need to learn to knit things for my babies" and so she did. She then taught us to knit when we were like 5. She also learned to crochet but decided to not teach us that???
I stuck with knitting for a very long time before even trying crochet, and it turns out the tension is completely different and I have a hard time with it. I can do it but it takes a lot more concentration. I also hold my yarn weird! I think it’s funny that everyone conflates the two crafts when they’re actually very different. But I get it. I couldn’t tell you the difference between two wood joining techniques.
you won't ever learning much of anything without real world experience.
reading books, videos, coursework, etc, will never give you experience.
for some reason people can't seem to understand this, and our entire education system basically ignores this.
For aquarium fish keeping, YouTube (fishtube) was pretty good but it's been getting worse because of all the ai sloptube. Probably a friend or local aquarium club is better if you can overcome any shyness.
For semihydroponic plant keeping YouTube is still okay except everyone is going to try to sell you specific brands of grow lights and fertilizers. We have a decent community here on Lemmy too.
Old cookbooks from the beginning of the industrial revolution
Why specifically then?
Mostly Escoffier, it gets into more detail as you read more recent books like Julia Child or something, but to understand the profession best I think this is where the foundational knowledge is.
For comp sci and music I've found access to a teacher who can help create a plan to achieve your goals and office hours or similar once or twice a week to point you in the right direction when you get stuck is the most efficient but also the most expensive route. Next best is books and online tutorials but without a plan and direction it's easy to waste time or get stuck on some concept or technique.
Blog posts and the arch linux wiki lol
Hobby is modern boardgames.
Best resource is the review and tutorial videos from Shut Up & Sit Down (SUSD)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5fM0cOxD2k
~~https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyRhIGDUKdIOw07Pd8pHxCw~~
Edit: Changed link from potatoes, to a review of Innovation. One of the best card games available.
Have you heard about what is happening to Steamforged games?
Nope
A good old money grab and run with licensed crowfunding board games. Probably to buy their new warmachine IP. No refunds anymore, no communication, all staff is gone and even the IP holders like Paradox Interactive or the press cant get a hold of them on questions
I've not played or seen their games.
Sounds like a real mess.
Oh it is! Tens of Millions of GBP stolen ^^
The actual best learning resource is casebooks and a professor, but for a lay person, I came across this comic called "The Illustrated Guide to Law' that you may have interest in. Real law written by an actual criminal defense attorney.
The actual best learning resource is casebooks...
IANAL, never went to law school, have no reason to study law except my own personal edification and wanting a better understanding of copyright licenses for purposes of licensing things I own the copyright on. But I read this particular casebook on U.S. intellectual property law cover-to-cover. (Slight lie. I read the 5th edition cover-to-cover. As I'm typing this, 6th edition is the new hotness.) Extremely informative and free. Free as in speech (cc-by-sa 3.0) and (if you're content with the PDF version) free as in beer. Even if you want the dead tree media version, it's only $37.35 on Amazon, which is super cheap for a big-ol' textbook like this.
James Boyle, co-author of that casebook, also wrote The Public Domain, which I have yet to read (except that the aforementioned casebook prescribes reading snippets from The Public Domain occasionally), but it's on my short list. It's way more approachable, and it's written more for a lay audience. And it's more focused on intellectual property reform advocacy.
...and a professor...
I signed up for Studicata at one point. It's basically a streaming service for bar-exam prep. Like $20/month when I was subscribed. I found it extremely easy to follow and the lecturer is quite entertaining, but the information is intended for law students, so it's presented more like a college course than lay kind of content. I wish they had an IP law section, but all of what's there is extremely informative. I haven't watched all the lectures they have, but I think the contract law portion was my favorite. I took tons of notes for later reference as well. Some day I plan to sign back up and go through the tort section, but I haven't yet.
I mean it's a little late now, but I would warn any non-lawyer that a casebook is primarily meant as a tool to learn to practice law. It's teaches you how judges think about the law when they're answering legal questions.
So, for example, let's say the legislature passes a law requiring all homes to have fire alarms. Is an apartment a home? What about a condominium? Manufactured home? RV? Accessory dwelling unit? The casebook will teach you how judges go about answering questions that do not have a clear answer and questions that could fairly be ruled either way. This helps lawyers learn to argue thorny issues, and it also prepares us to respond to or advocate for changes to the law.
For non-lawyers, most law that we interact with in our day to day life is more cut and dry: you have to pay for the bus ticket to board, the sale of a product is final once you purchased, etc. Reading a casebook probably isn't going to benefit you more than reading a web article, where the issues are clearly laid out, explained, and specific to your jurisdiction. Whereas in casebook opinions, the judges can get a little arcane or circular, and the judges in your jurisdiction could think about the issue in a different way entirely from the case in the casebook.
It’s teaches you how judges think about the law when they’re answering legal questions.
I mean... I want to know that, though.
For non-lawyers, most law that we interact with in our day to day life is more cut and dry: you have to pay for the bus ticket to board, the sale of a product is final once you purchased, etc.
So, I'm a software engineer, right? And, there's this ongoing case that I'm really invested in. SFC v. Vizio. If it's ruled the way I hope it'll be ruled, I'll be able to replace the firmware on a lot more of my consumer electronics devices with fully FOSS firmware that will let me disable things I don't like (tracking, advertising, etc) and add additional functionality (features that the manufacturer either didn't think to include or actively wants me not to have).
I want to understand the legal arguments made by the parties in the case (which mostly center around the intersection of IP law and contract law, by the way; both sides are quoting different snippets of MDY v. Blizzard in support of their own arguments). I've been reading the documents published on that page I linked above to keep track of where it all sits at any one time. And, while the actual trial hasn't started yet, a lot of what's come out makes it feel very promising that indeed the ruling is most likely going to come out in a way that I would see as favorable.
That court case also centers around the GNU GPL family of licenses. I write software on the side (like, not just during my day job) that I own the copyright on and publish under FOSS licenses, and I want to have an understanding what implications it's going to have if I use the AGPLv3 vs an MIT license vs the WTFPL. And I want to know not just what the FSF or whoever has to say about what implications the use of a particular license has, but how judges are likely to interpret it moving forward. (In fact, the SFC v. Vizio case I mentioned above is using a legal theory that runs afoul of the FSF's own interpretation of the GPL family of licenses. If I took the FSF's own "web article"s at their word rather than reading MDY v. Blizzard in that casebook and then looking into SFV v. Vizio, I would have had some serious misconceptions about how copyright licenses, particularly on software, would work and what it would "mean" to put a given public license on my work.)
There are other ways in which I feel I've gotten benefit from leaning what I learned specifically in the way I learned it rather than just from "web articles". There are for sure other folks who aren't interested in knowing that kind of stuff (as is the case with basically any field of study you can name). But I also don't agree that "reading a casebook probably isn’t going to benefit you more than reading a web article" is universally true for all "non-lawyers", regardless of their particular aims.
judges in your jurisdiction could think about the issue in a different way entirely from the case in the casebook.
True. It's worth keeping in mind what jurisdiction something happens in, but then again it's often the case that what happens legally in another jurisdiction can still affect you. SFC v. Vizio is taking place in California, under California law. (The defendant even got it removed to federal court under a preemption argument, but the federal court agreed with the petitioner that that argument lacked merit and granted a motion to take it back to California state court.) But in the U.S., it's very often the case that when something happens in California, it nonetheless in practice (if not in theory) largely have beneficial effects everywhere in the U.S., if not also outside the U.S. For instance, many companies which implement means to comply with certain privacy provisions mandated by California law don't bother limit its use only to California residents. SFC v. Vizio will get me a FOSS OS for Vizio smart TVs whether I'm in California or not.
Plus, a lot of what I've studied is U.S. federal law which affects every part of the U.S..
My trade, bioinformatics/computational biology... a ton of software documentation, tutorials, guides, vignettes... And some programming books here-and-there (which the authors released online for free). There are Master's programs, but realistically hands-on researchers overwhelmingly learn by doing. The field is just too small and scattered... The downside of this approach is that my field is traditionally criticized for having little to no adherence to software engineering best-practices
My hobby, there are like 2 websites (one is a dedicated webpage, one a GitHub wiki) that contain literally everything one needs to know about them
I am in professional consultancy. You learn by fucking up, and try again just to fuck it up again (less intensely ).
Apprenticeship is the only way, but you need books to help pass the exams.
Sacramento State courses were at one time considered the best: https://owp.csus.edu/operator-training/courses/correspondence-courses/wastewater-courses/course.php?sectionId=1947&has_child_courses=1
I'm even if they aren't considered great anymore, doing the correspondence course which costs $50 and is a series of online multiple choice questions gives you 90 training hours towards your renewal requirements which is more than two years worth here.
I understand operators these days prefer the WEF manuals: https://www.wef.org/publications/operator-training-manuals/ Perhaps they kept up with the standard exams better.
On the engineering side I love the WEF MOP, especially MOP 8: https://connect.wef.org/s/store#/store/browse/detail/a2nRP000000oa6jYAA
We joke that Metcalf and Eddy is our bible but it's the most basic starting point in research. I think people take the joke too literally sometimes:
Money.
Canning I use things like the Ball website or things like the National Center for Home Food Preservation for safe recipes. A lot of...YouTube stuff is not safe, or use very outdated methods like canning in the oven or wax or just turning them upside down and back upright.
music, and the best resource is a microphone so you can record your practices and listen to them.
Apprenticeship.
There will come a point where you plateau and need not just a teacher but a mentor.
Someone on tap who can answer your questions and give critical, constructive, trusted feedback.