When I first started completing lessons and labs I became fixated on watching my progress mount up. Following the green circles fill up was exciting. I really wanted to make a lot of progress quickly, the blue ‘Next Lesson’ button calling my name.
Let me be perfectly clear here; there is no set pace out there that you should emulate. Nine lessons a day? 12 hours a day? One section per week? It really doesn’t matter. What does matter, however, is this: Are you learning? This hit me rather hard after completing the Intro to Ruby track and then moving on to the HTML/CSS code-along section. I had blazed through the TTT labs and thought I was really getting a hang of the fundamentals of Ruby when I started the code along. When the tedious code along was finally over I jumped back into Procedural Ruby and (sad Panda) fell flat on face, having put very little REAL knowledge into memory.
The result? I went back to my notes, started watching old lectures, and began handwriting code with colored markers on graph paper.
There are days when my pace is one lab a day. I don’t want to end up blazing through the course without gaining any real knowledge of the fundamentals.
So, do as much as you can and as much as you want. The key for me was to be sure that I enjoy the learning experience and connect with others.
My one rule of thumb: *Code Every Day.