The goal is to speedup becoming productive in that environment.
where productive =
desigining and implementing pieces of a big application (pieces 1K - 5K LOC, full project (50K LOC)) it implies making atleast 'not-bad' design and implementation choices and being able to think with the language/ frameworks with reasonable fluency to propose designs quickly. giving meaningful feedback to other programmers who are doing similar activity.
i realize that it takes time to get really good at and knowing the internals of the whole stack. Looking for approaches wherein the time to productivity can be reduced.
Okay, I seem to get it. Originally it seemed to me like: "I want to know everything without having to actually understand everything (just give me the most important bits and I will memorize them)."
But now I guess you simply want the information well-ordered, meaning that if you invest e.g. 100 hours of your time into learning, you get the most value anyone could get from 100 hours. Where "value" could mean perhaps: how useful it would be for average programmer's average task.
Two possible issues:
1) Maybe sometimes specialization provide...
Software developers have to repeatedly and continually learn massive number of new concepts, procedures and techniques related to the latest languages, frameworks and technologies up and down the stack.
The best way to learn would of course be to continuously read books in the spare time one isn't solving problems on the job and apply that knowledge.
I personally find reading books too time consuming for me. Books are presented in a depth first fashion, delving into multiple areas in depth one by one. This is not ideal for becoming productive quickly. There is no explicit ordering of how necessary / frequent a particular concept / technique is either.
What other sources of information / classes of sources are highest yield for picking up new technologies quickly [In the sense of getting productive fast].
An example of a high yield resources are well made slide decks. As an example, a slide deck on a language(e.g. javascript) made for experienced developers new to the language is much faster to process than a book. I can absorb the major features of the language, the syntax etc from a good slide deck in a fraction of the time it would take to read the introductory chapter of a book.
Any general comments (or specific sources) on how one would go about learning a new tech stack quickly would help too.
My current stack is linux, apache, python, django, dynamo, js, backbone