{"id":47,"date":"2009-01-14T22:15:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-14T22:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/karwin.com\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/01\/14\/learn-to-program-in-21-days\/"},"modified":"2009-01-14T22:15:00","modified_gmt":"2009-01-14T22:15:00","slug":"learn-to-program-in-21-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/karwin.com\/blog\/index.php\/2009\/01\/14\/learn-to-program-in-21-days\/","title":{"rendered":"Learn to Program in 21 Days"},"content":{"rendered":"

A user recently asked:<\/p>\n

Has anyone “learned how to program in 21 days?”<\/p>\n

\n

I’m not a fan of these learn how to program in X amount of days books. Some even boast, learn how to program in 24 hours. This is a joke and an insult to me as a software engineer who went through a rigorous discipline in computer science and mathematics.<\/p>\n

So a question to the community, have you benefited from these become a programmer quick books?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n
\n

No, it’s impossible to learn how to program in 24 hours or 21 days.<\/p>\n

See “Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years<\/a>,” an article by Peter Norvig (Director of Research at Google, Inc.).<\/p>\n

If you already<\/strong> have good fundamental skills at programming, and you just need a tutorial-style book to guide you through learning a new API, then these kinds of books may be helpful.<\/p>\n

Even then, the level of expertise will be shallow. It will take many months (at least) to become really proficient. But the quick-introduction books are useful to give you a taste of the range of functionality in a language or API.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

I’m posting to my blog the questions I’ve answered on StackOverflow, which earned the “Good Answer” badge. This was my answer to “Has anyone ‘learned how to program in 21 days?’<\/a>“<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A user recently asked: Has anyone “learned how to program in 21 days?” I’m not a fan of these learn how to program in X amount of days books. Some even boast, learn how to program in 24 hours. This is a joke and an insult to me as a software engineer who went through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[23,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-programming"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pawgV7-L","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/karwin.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/karwin.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/karwin.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karwin.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karwin.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/karwin.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/karwin.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karwin.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/karwin.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}