Teach Yourself Programming in 10,000 Hours

norvig.com

27 points·douglasputnam··8 comments

990 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243

105 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1060176

The big question: how much have you learned about programming in those 990 days?

Is there some time after which the exact same URLs can be resubmitted?

No. You get a new story if no previous one with that url is in memory, which is increasingly likely if it's older. It works surprisingly well in practice.

If there is, it's not within 100 days. I'm pretty sure that people are just adding superfluous arguments to the urls they submit.

I think that there is nothing wrong with this for old timeless articles, if done infrequently enough.

The most important thing when taking on something new is to start. Even if you only get the basics over a few days, hopefully that can get you far enough down the trail to boost your motivation to learn more.

The "X in Y Days" pattern is just one of many that can pull in interested, but not significantly motivated, readers. The books, then, should be judged on their abilities to give their readers a good kick in the butt ;-)

Instead of solely teaching syntax and methods, these rapid learning books should devote a lot to teaching people "how to learn" and what routes to take to learn the specific language better.

This has been posted multiple times already. We get it - programming is hard.

According to the quoted sources, anything is hard if you want to do it very well.

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