

How I Taught Myself Python/Django in 8 Weekends - vacanti
http://tech.yipit.com/2012/08/21/how-i-taught-myself-to-code-in-8-weeks/

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dave_sullivan
I'm seeing a lot of these posts lately, it reminds me of a Woody Allen joke:

Roughly "I'm taking a class on speed reading. I was able to read War and Peace
in one night. It's about Russia."

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pdelgallego
Now the OP just need to teach himself programming in ten years [1] ;)

[1] <http://norvig.com/21-days.html>

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klibertp
I disagree.

The essay you link to is absolutely fabulous and I couldn't agree with it's
conclusions more, but I know that I want to be a programmer. I 'always' (since
10) knew it and now, nearly twenty years later, which were filled with
programming and little other than programming I'm still the same. I want to be
a programmer, I struggle for mastery in nearly every aspect of my
art/craft/... and I don't mind spending another twenty years in ever more
obscure corners of it.

Now, this doesn't have to be the case for OP. Maybe he want's to create
something which he can sell, or maybe he just wants to be literate in
computers. There could be lots of reasons one wants to learn programming in 21
days (or 8 weekend, or whatever).

What I want to say is that although programming could eat your whole life in
one bite not everyone wants this to happen and such people are perfectly right
to try and learn a bit and then stop.

...sorry, I had a hard day at job today, I just needed to write something.
Don't mind me :)

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tankbot
No apology needed.

It was very well said and not at all inflammatory.

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mkramlich
I love the meme I'm seeing lately in some of the articles like this, that
"it's only been recently that it's been possible to teach yourself to
program". Having flashbacks to 1981, personally. I'm sure some of you other
oldsters are having flashbacks to the 70's. Yes, Virginia, it has been
possible for a few decades now to teach yourself how to code, how computers
work, and to write real software that people will pay you for. This is not a
new phenomenon or new capability.

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nhebb
I think that should be qualified. Computers weren't as ubiquitous back in the
70's as they are now, nor was learning material. The TRS-80 with monitor was
released in 1977 for ~$600 - about $2200 in today's dollars. I only knew of
several kids with home systems.

When I took Computer Math (my high school's programming class), we had to
learn programming on a piece of cardboard! It was the CARDIAC, Cardboard
Illustrative Aid To Computation -
<http://www.simnia.com/it/cardiac/cardiac.htm>.

After we became adept as manually running programs on the cardboard, we
transitioned to dialing into a mainframe. Nothing says fun like dialing a
rotary phone over and over until you finally made a connection. And of course,
mainframe time was limited, so our BASIC and FORTRAN programs had to be
written out by hand before hand. The CLI was an unforgiving beast and
disconnections were frequent.

Could people teach themselves to program in the 70's? Sure, but there's really
no comparison to the learning opportunities available today, and I don't think
it's right to disparage anyone who blogs about their learning experiences.

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slurgfest
Good for you, keep it up! Produce some cool things, then learn some new tools,
rinse and repeat :)

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patrikmcguire
If it works to get people started then it works. I honestly don't remember how
I got started programming - some people rhapsodize about that first moments
coding, but for me it was mostly rage at a capricious Java compiler that I
felt was always either finding a creative way to do something other than when
it should or throwing an error completely unrelated to what was wrong.

After I got past that point everything was gravy. I've always been kind of
confused by the learning curve metaphor (If the learning curve is steep,
doesn't that mean you learn faster? What's the x and what's the y in this?)
but tech now is getting closer to the ideal linear curve, where additional
learning and productivity are at a relatively constant proportion no matter
what stage you're at rather than being a floor function until you hit a
certain level.

Which is awesome.

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robbles
The phrase "steep learning curve" is probably a misnomer, since the graph most
people are talking about has "learning" or "experience" on the dependent axis,
and time on the independent axis. So a steep slope on a graph like this would
represent something that's very easy to learn.

What most people seem to refer to with this phrase, however, is some kind of
exponential function, where the slope is really small (difficult to learn) at
the start, and hopefully increases as you get past the initial hurdle.

I guess it stems from confusion with other real-world metaphors, like climbing
steep hills, which also happens to be difficult.

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the_cat_kittles
I would have titled this "How I taught Myself Enough Python/Django to do what
I wanted in 8 weekends" ...there is so much to both of them, you can always
learn more. But, you are indeed cruising, keep up the good work!

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b0rsuk
This post may not be perfect, but it's just what I've been looking for.

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rozap
The more you know, the more you know you don't know.

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naavinm
Intermeresting.

