Friday, February 17, 2006

The virtue of the black box

When I was in campus, I got exposed to the concept of viewing a thing [system/whatever] as a black box. You put stuff in. Get stuff out. You don't really care what goes on in there to get you what you wanted. Ignorance is indeed bliss.

Recently, I've started doing some reading. Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2000. Yes. I only read tutorials and books that come in html version. This particular read happens to be in .chm format. Anyway. I realised that I need to read if I'm to have a chance at earning a higher salary.

I got to a section titled 'System Architecture Overview' the other night. Nice small section. I got to a point where the author was talking about different lock or update mechanisms or something. I felt physical pain as I read, and attempted to wrap my mind around the stuff being talked about. After a couple of sentences, the author would then say something like "This will be explained further in Chapter 15". I was laughing and crying at the same time. I'm in Chapter 3 and it's already bad. How will I survive at least 15 more chapters, chapters with greater detail on material I'm already struggling to assimilate. Isn't it wonderful when you just use something and not bother with how it works. I made my bed. Now I have to lie in it, clustered indexes and all.

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