Read this: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Researchers (Hayes, Bloom) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology.
There are a lot of books that tell you how to learn things in 3 days, or 24 hours – or whatever. I frequently tell my students that you have to spend time being bad at something before you can be reasonably expected to be good at it – but I’m not sure about the whole ‘anything worth knowing takes 10 years to learn’.
Substitute ‘learn’ with ‘master’, and you might be onto something.
