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Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [ title: Of the top ten, nine are programming books the other is about bookkeeping. Similar results come from replacing "teach yourself" with "learn" or "hours" with "days. Idiots can learn it in 21 days , even if they are dummies.
In 24 hours you won't have time to write several significant programs, and learn from your successes and failures with them. In short, you won't have time to learn much. So the book can only be talking about a superficial familiarity, not a deep understanding. As Alexander Pope said, a little learning is a dangerous thing. So what's the point? Alan Perlis once said: But then you're not learning how to program; you're learning to accomplish that task.
Retrieved 6 January People keep telling me that in order to code you have to be a former child prodigy in your early 20s with a PhD, after having sacrificed your childhood to master the art. Like a photo album you see [my] progression and change Archived from the original on 16 June Space Research and Remote Sensing Organization. Media Control GfK International.
Unfortunately, this is not enough, as the next section shows. The key is deliberative practice: There appear to be no real shortcuts: In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of 1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since , and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers , was released in Malcolm Gladwell has popularized the idea, although he concentrates on 10, hours, not 10 years. Henri Cartier-Bresson had another metric: True expertise may take a lifetime: Samuel Johnson said "Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price.
Anders Ericsson puts it, "In most domains it's remarkable how much time even the most talented individuals need in order to reach the highest levels of performance. The 10, hour number just gives you a sense that we're talking years of 10 to 20 hours a week which those who some people would argue are the most innately talented individuals still need to get to the highest level. Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. The best kind of learning is learning by doing.
To put it more technically, "the maximal level of performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained automatically as a function of extended experience, but the level of performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate efforts to improve. Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life is an interesting reference for this viewpoint.
Talk with other programmers; read other programs. This is more important than any book or training course. If you want, put in four years at a college or more at a graduate school. This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don't enjoy school, you can with some dedication get similar experience on your own or on the job. In any case, book learning alone won't be enough.
One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software , has his own news group , and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub. Work on projects with other programmers. Be the best programmer on some projects; be the worst on some others.
When you're the best, you get to test your abilities to lead a project, and to inspire others with your vision. When you're the worst, you learn what the masters do, and you learn what they don't like to do because they make you do it for them. Work on projects after other programmers. Understand a program written by someone else. See what it takes to understand and fix it when the original programmers are not around.
Think about how to design your programs to make it easier for those who will maintain them after you. Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Remember that there is a " computer " in "computer science".
Year-Old Japanese Woman Finds Success in Coding (www.farmersmarketmusic.com) Not anyone can code successfully, but success as a coder can come. Thailand's Richest · Japan's Richest · Australia's Richest · Taiwan's Richest The only way to get better at programming is to actually program. In the process, I learned the most important lesson of my programming career. come out all the time, so the programmers that succeed are the ones who.
Know how long it takes your computer to execute an instruction, fetch a word from memory with and without a cache miss , read consecutive words from disk, and seek to a new location on disk. Get involved in a language standardization effort. Either way, you learn about what other people like in a language, how deeply they feel so, and perhaps even a little about why they feel so.
Have the good sense to get off the language standardization effort as quickly as possible.
With all that in mind, its questionable how far you can get just by book learning. Before my first child was born, I read all the How To books, and still felt like a clueless novice. Instead, I relied on my personal experience, which turned out to be far more useful and reassuring to me than the thousands of pages written by experts. Fred Brooks, in his essay No Silver Bullet identified a three-part plan for finding great software designers: When software developers weren't interested in her idea about mobile games for older adults, year-old Masako Wakamiya took matters into her own hands.
Since learning to write code in early , the retired bank clerk has gone on to author a free iOS game, Hinadan , specifically geared toward an older, Japanese audience. The app has garnered nearly 5 stars on the Apple App Store, and roughly 53, downloads worldwide, since its debut a year ago; Wakamiya is now busy planning future versions in English, Chinese and possibly French.
Just as Facebook and Apple see a median employee age of 29 and 31, respectively, Wakamiya is busy leaving ageist naysayers in the dust. For Wakamiya, the answer comes down to motivation. After noticing a lack of mobile games for older people in her country — in the United States, AARP Games offers many options — Wakamiya asked software developers to step in.
Uninterested, they suggested she make a game herself. She took them up on the suggestion. Upon retiring from a year career as a bank clerk she began at age 18 , Wakamiya spent long hours caregiving for her thenyear-old mother. Feeling isolated, and seeking connection with the outside world, Wakamiya bought her first computer, then moved on to a Microsoft PC, and later a Mac and iPhones.
In between learning the piano, at age 75, Wakamiya eventually joined a computer club for seniors, Mellow Club, learning to create Excel art along the way. The game requires in-depth memorization of various arrangements, and has become especially popular with older women, who enjoy playing it with their grandchildren, Wakamiya said. Get tips and resources to protect yourself from fraud and see the latest scam alerts in your state. You are leaving AARP. Please return to AARP.