Tips for Independent Learning?

Austin asks: "As an undergraduate seeking a degree in Computer Science, I am very interested in expanding my programming skills and tools. Much of the platform specific knowledge, such as the usage of unique languages and APIs such as .NET and Cocoa, are rarely taught on an academic level, and independent projects are looking very appealing as a way to broaden my abilities. I find it difficult to maintain motivation developing software that there are already excellent alternatives to, and contributing to mainstream open source projects is an intimidating endeavor due to their size and complexity. What have many Slashdot readers done to gain experience with tools not taught inside the classroom?"

Comments

Re:Port an existing project you wrote

[4D6963]

When I want to learn a new programming environment, I pick out a simple project that I have already written in a known environment and port it to the new system.

Funny, that made me remember that without meaning to do that I did that everytime I learnt a new language. Everytime I tried porting a simple message encrypting program that I did in BASIC on a children portable computer (those with a B&W screen of 20x2) when I was 13-14.

It's actually a pretty good way to compare and understand the differences between two different languages (such as the handling of arrays, function arguments and pointers, indexing, memory allocation, strings etc..)