my black box learning experience

One of the most common question when you start learning cyber sec or Linux or anything related to CS is “where do I start?”, “what should I refer?” The most common answer to this is, “just start”.

my experience

When I started learning, one of my first course was mit’s missing semester. It is about basic Linux commands and some things which aren’t taught in your college. This helped me a lot for using zsh. When exploring projects while applying the above course, I would end up learning more about certain stuff which would start a chain of new topics which I would end up learning about.

the chain

And now I understood why they say, “just start”. Learning from a course is fine but when you start applying that in a project, that’s when you really learn. For example, when I learned about encryption and it’s types I looked into hybrid encryption which led me to hashing and how it works. Now when I built a password manager, these things helped me a lot. Another example is when I was looking at apt, it led me to brew which actually contains much latest versions of most tools compared to apt. So building projects expanded my knowledge more than any course could. These “chain of topics” will always help you later. There were times when you would just use a library without realizing the actually meaning of the method or how it works. This is called black box learning. This can be done when you do not want to learn about a topic but still want to use it, either because it’s too advanced or because you just don’t care. Either way, once you enter the “chain of topics” as I called it earlier, you will slowly start understanding the things you skipped in the black box learning process.

what’s the answer?

The answer to the question depends on your perspective, curiosity and learning curve. For me, it was doing more projects, getting comfortable to the environment while NOT ignoring “chain of topics” and black box learning. The above improved my knowledge much more than I could ever imagine and in a faster way too. Learning from a course will always have a bias, when you learn on your own and build these “chain of topics”, you will actually learn all the perspective and different alternative to everything.

@san Edit this blog