When I was 11, I pulled a book off the shelf at the nearby library called "Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days". I remember thinking the title was clearly nonsense, but if I could even learn a fraction of it, that would be pretty cool. We didn't have a computer at home yet, so I wrote out the exercises by hand.

I think I got about a third of the way through. I knew (debatably) what inheritance was, that a Dog is an Animal, etc.

School, university, and 10 years of career later across multiple stacks and companies, there's still a heap I don't know, but you can drop me in a lot of codebases and I'll figure it out.

> So go ahead and buy that Java/Ruby/Javascript/PHP book; you'll probably get some use out of it. But you won't change your life, or your real overall expertise as a programmer in 24 hours or 21 days.

True, but it DID change my life.