Notes or No?

Hello! So I'm a super newbie just trying Unity out, and with following courses and all I've been taking notes on the information taught. However it's kind of slowed my pacing with learning, and although I'm in no rush I just want to learn in the most effective way possible. Is it worth it to take notes or is it better to just keep doing courses and projects until info is drilled into my memory?

 

When you start taking notes of the things you learn, you will need a forest worth of paper.
Then you have a big pile of papers where you can't do Ctrl + F to find something you need.

Your most important skill is knowing how to use google. Noone here knows everything.
We all google stuff we forgot, but the trick is to know what to google.
You will gain that wisdom by reading a lot of tutorials, papers, etc.

 

Practicing is nearly always best way to learn.
Taking notes may help, but these should be only keywords, rather than copying what was said in tutorials.

Practice, practice, again practice. Try thing on your own. Experiment. Then back to documentation and bits of theory, if necessary. And repeat.

 

Why take notes when you already have such documentation? It's more worthwhile to get familiar with the Unity lingo and C# syntax. I have been programming for 20 years and there hasn't been a day where I didn't use Google to check up on the particulars of some native method. Someone that can remember them all is quite the savant.

One mental trick I use is to keep typing out the code myself and use ctrl-c as little as possible when learning. As soon as I achieve "flow" with a certain aspect I consider that box ticked off. From that point onward it's a matter of repetition to keep the mental picture alive. Knowing the right keywords and method names help Googling stuff more quickly.

If you are not under any obligation from some employer that wants to profit off of you yesterday rather then tomorrow, embrace the slow burn of learning to program / develop. I consider every line of every script I wrote in the past as my "notes". So document your code and don't just throw away old projects.

 

Only you can answer that question; how do you "function"? Repetition works for me better than taking notes, but it's me.

 

@Jawile23
Alot of these guys gave good advice. But my advice to you, is to take some notes. Moreso on paper or other. Why? Because those notes might come in handy later on.

 

Only if you use physical paper. There are a number of solid note taking apps available for desktop and mobile devices so nothing prevents you from taking notes that you can easily navigate and search. Some of them include optical character recognition to analyze handwritten text and text in images you add to your notes.

 

The most important things to learn are general concepts. How assets are different from scenes and how they relate? What is a component, and what are the options for getting a reference to one? How do I switch scenes, and how to I transfer information between them?

Your notes for those kinds of things won't be that long, and really once you do them a few times you won't need notes at all. Everything else you can just bookmark documentation, forum pages, and youtube videos which explain things you think you will need to reference.

 

The issue is, as a newbie, how does one know what is important and should be noted somewhere and what is not. I think learning how to use the manual, good Google fu, and C# intellisense are so much more valuable.

I make a tremendous amount of notes and storyboarding when starting a project, so I'm not against note taking. I just think notes like that are rarely referred to and become a librarian nightmare to keep together, relevant, up-to-date, and accessible. That being said, the act of taking a note is probable enough to commit it to memory, and if that's the result, how can I argue with that.