When is Googling it wrong?
- by Drahcir
I've been going through Stack Overflow for quite a bit now and noticed certain people (usually experienced programmers) frown upon Googling (researching) certain problems.
Since I myself tend to use Google quite a bit to solve certain programming related issues I found certain comments rather demoralising. Now some of you may have come here trigger happy to delete this post but I needed some clarification.
I usually Google things that usually syntax related that I would have never figured out on my own. For example I once wondered how to access the properties of a class that I didn't have a direct relationship to. So after a bit of research I discovered reflection and got what I wanted.
Now in another scenario is learning a new language, in my case Silverlight were it differs in certain aspects of .NET compared to say ASP.NET. A few weeks ago I had no idea how to load another Silverlight page (usercontrol) and had to Google my way to the solution which I found wasn't as simple as I had imagined.
In scenario three is were I myself frown up, that is just stealing a huge chunk of code to avoid doing the work yourself, for example paging a HTML table using JavaScript, where one just copies and pastes the JavasSript code without as much as trying to understand how it works. I do admit I have done this once or twice before for trivial tasks that had very little time limit and weren't all that important but most of the time still have to throw away what I found because it took too much time to adapt it and get what I wanted out of it.
In the last scenario, I sometimes have a piece of code that I would be really unhappy about, as in I find it sloppy or too overcomplicated and try to look on the Internet to see other ways to tackle the same problem, let's say filtering through a table. With the knowledge I acquire I learned new coding practices that help me work more efficiently like "Do not repeat yourself" and such.
Now in your opinion when do you find it wrong to use Google (or any other researching tool) to find a solution to your problem?
