“I Google, so should you” *
When I asked Nehal J. Wani to write for this blog, I gave him the option to write on a lot of topics. He refused and stated that if he ever had to write a post, the aforementioned quote is all it would contain. It’s hilarious initially, extremely so, but then you begin to realize the wisdom behind those words. Google and other Search Engines have become so powerful and contain so much knowledge in today’s world, that almost any query you have can be answered by a couple of well constructed web searches.
So before you go up to someone and ask something, do quick search to check if the answer to your question isn’t already well addressed in the 13th comment of a post on forum.
Google and other capable search engines will, with the right amount of tweaking of the search operators, query terms and other search modifiers, get you the answer you were looking for, even if it’s the 13th comment on an unrelated post on a forum; or at the very least they will give you what to further “Google” for.
Got a compile error, don’t know what it means? Copy and paste it into Google, see what comes up, more often than not, the first couple of search hits will sort it out for you.
Have a phrase, that you know some of the words to, but can’t remember the full thing? No problem, Google’s got you covered with the ” * ” operator.
Searching is for all intents and purposes a life skill in today’s interconnected, internet proliferated world. It will serve you well in the pursuit of knowledge and is an essential tool in any Programmer/Designer/SW Engineer’s Toolkit.
If some or all of this sounds like gibberish to you, or if you’re not familiar with search operators and such, It is easily remedied. I’ve taken the liberty of doing the first Google search for you, so here are some links to get you started, and serve as follow up material to this post.
- Power Searching with Google , An online course on power searching with Google, by Google.
- Importance of learning to Google efficiently, This is a thread on Programmers.Stackexchange and is worth a read.
— Anhad Jai Singh
* This quote was Originally used by Ankush Jain, and all credits and rights of usage and/or ownership belong to him. 😛
cd OpenSource; ls 