Tools and Techniques for Improving your Memory?

An Anonymous Coward asks: "Like many of you, I'm a IT drone trying to complete various tech certifications. My question is simple: how do you manage to remember all this junk? A lot of it comes naturally to me, but remembering which commandline switch does what or remembering some obscure reference to a tool sometimes causes me to blank on a test. Instructor-led courses seem to be a very expensive, very general overview of material, which almost require you to buy your own study guides to get more complete details. After you leave said classroom, you don't remember most of the topic anyway (Dilbert's 'I summon the vast power of Certification!' come to mind). So I ask the Slashdot crowd: what tools or memory techniques do you use to retain and remember the information you learn?"

Comments

Use it.

[krogoth]

Use it a lot, and you won't even have to think about it. My firewalling forces passive FTP, so from now on i'll remember that it's wget --passive-ftp, because I use wget to FTP files and directories frequently. Similarly, i've memorized the fact that du -hc --max-depth=1 in the root directory will give me a nice report on where my GBs are going, because I do that a lot. And I can do ssh/scp in my sleep :)

You don't have to remember it all...

[RadioheadKid]

Someone once told me when I was in college, I think it was one of my engineering professors, that you don't go to college to learn, you go there to learn how to learn. I can't begin to tell you how true that has turned out to be.

At the start of a new project, you're usually at the bottom of the learning curve, now do you memorize all the new specfications there are about the project? No, you research them, understand them, and pool together the resources you will need to find information on that topic. I still open my first year C programming book at least a few times a month, and looking at a man page to get some info on a command line switch is a very common occurence also. Engineering specs. for whatever project I'm working on are always close at hand too. A search on the internet to verify and find out more info on a topic also very common. I think about all the classes I took in college and what percentage of that actual knowledge I use on a daily basis and its probably around 10-20%. Now if I look at all the stuff I've learned since then, enormous. And the more you learn, the more you learn how much more there is to learn. (sorry for all the cliche-like lines, but they're really true)

So basically, what I'm trying to say here, is take the stuff you learn in class as a seed, and then use it to grow from, you don't have to retain all that information, just know that you can find it if you need it at some point.
Hope that helps...

KidA