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Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

norvig.com

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Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#41

Post by emiljbs »

orangethirty wrote: post #33

I started at age 7. I'm 34 now. Still learning, and still feeling like a noob. Can't get enough of this, though.

I started at 12 with C++, then I went over to 13 and learnt some Python, then I learnt Lisp at 16 and that's when I started to actually learn programming.

I know this sounds like a "lel Lisp is superior to your blub lang" but it's more of a "I actually went past procedural programming and stupid OO with Lisp and it felt like I finally actually knew something about the stuff I did".

Dunno why I'm typing this out though, oh what the heck, posting it anyway.

Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#44

Post by michaelwww »

thenduks wrote: post #42
michaelwww wrote: post #40

I'd like to meet the person who would buy a book titled "Teach yourself computer programming in 10 years."

The books that don't claim to teach you in 24 hours/21 days/etc are the 'teach yourself in 10 years' books :)

True, but I mean specifically titled that. Such a person might be particularly earnest and focused and might be worth talking to. Or an idiot.

Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#46

Post by igravious »

Isn't it odd and curious and such like that the chunks of time bandied about are units of ten? Coincidentally equal to the number of fingers on our hands. 10 years. 10,000 hours. I'd be willing to bet my granny's dentures that if we had eight fingers on each hand those numbers would be 16 years and 65536 hours (well, I mean it would still be 10 and 10,000 but you know what I mean).

Also, did you know that in many cultures (ancient Greece, Aramaic, Hebrew, Chinese, to name but some) 10,000† just means "a heck of a lot", "more than you can count". So you see, 10,000 is a bit too magical for me to take seriously.

† Here's a wikipedia entry but I think I read about this in a history of mathematics book, cannot remember which one, sorry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10000_(number)

Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)

#47

Post by wahnfrieden »

sn0v wrote: post #45

Um, hasn't this been posted and reposted already? Not trying to be a smartass, but I thought this article was already pretty popular, and generally the standard response to any beginner asking how he could learn X in 10/21 days.

Yeah hence the ? to get around URL dupe detection :p
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