Jun 5 2008

Teach yourself programming in 10 years

This is a very appropriate title.

I am no expert by any means - even if I have more than 10 years under my belt (starting with 6501 assembly, then some C, a little bit of C++, PHP, Java, and now Ruby. I still have a lot to learn in this area (Lisp or Prolog, Smalltalk, whatever).

So I found an article with the same title as this here:

http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Of some of the things he discusses therein - I agree the most with the one that says: a language does not worth learning if it does not change the way you think about things (on computers for a start).

So all those books like teach yourself java in 24 hours, 7 days, a week, or a month - they worth something, but obviously even if you know the syntax of a language - which is a must of course - it does not make you a good programmer. Not at all. It is all but just the beginning of the road. Enough said.