Unconventional way of studying things..

Sometimes I think that I studied lot of things in engineering text books, but don't have any clue on how the concepts/formula derived or how much analysis they put behind on those concepts.That research or hacking experience generally missing in text books. Sorry ..I am not saying school/college text books are bad. We ( as students) always needs to read text books .. but what I am trying to convey is... sometimes  textbooks are missing practical possibilities of  formulas or concepts.

There comes the importance of unconventional way of studying things..  or the hackers(in good sense) way of mastering the interested areas. Our schools and  colleges should give these kind of opportunities for students.

 Okay.....

These things came to my mind when I was watching the below video... 





She (http://jvns.ca )  explains the tool 'strace'

I tried 'strace' against our normal linux command 'ls'. This actually listed me amazing tracing log ...

 This is just an example .All concepts that we are studying/hearing should have unconventional way of mastering it or we should at least try to develop it !!!

None of the computer text books might have taught you on, what actually happens behind the 'ls' command. But the unconventional way is, find out some tool which can list the activities behind 'ls' and mastering what is it doing.... obviously it is very difficult, but  it gives you the full concepts behind the 'ls' upto very low/machine level.

Unconventional way of studying things opens opportunities which are not described in most of the text books That gives you the confidence to question the actual concepts or current implementation.

But it will have some initial difficulties and extra research  out of your text books or tutorials. But I am sure that there will be always some supporting tools/methods which somebody might have implemented already or you can implement such a method if it's not there!! :-)

Below is the screenshot of 'strace' on  'ls' in command line

some research on each system calls behind means ..