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The first 78 were computer books number 79 was Learn Bengali in 30 days . I replaced days with hours and got remarkably similar results: 253 more books, with 77 computer books followed by Teach Yourself Grammar and Style in 24 Hours at number 78. The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about computers, or that computers are somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. There are no books on how to learn Beethoven, or Quantum Physics, or even Dog Grooming in a few days. Lets analyze what a title like Learn Pascal in Three Days could mean: Learn: In 3 days you wont have time to write several significant programs, and learn from your successes and failures with them. You wont have time to work with an experienced programmer and understand what it is like to live in that environment. So they can only be talking about a superficial familiarity, not a deep understanding. Pascal: In 3 days you might be able to learn the syntax of Pascal if you already knew a similar language, but you couldnt learn much about how to use the syntax. In short, if you were, say, a Basic programmer, you could learn to write programs in the style of Basic using Pascal syntax, but you couldnt learn what Pascal is actually good and bad for. Alan Perlis once said: A language that doesnt affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing. One possible point is that you have to learn a tiny bit of Pascal or more likely, something like Visual Basic or JavaScript because you need to interface with an existing tool to accomplish a specific task.
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 appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene, appearing on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Samuel Johnson thought it took longer than ten years: Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime;
When youre the best, you get to test your abilities to lead a project, and to inspire others with your vision. When youre the worst, you learn what the masters do, and you learn what they dont like to do because they make you do it for them. See what it takes to understand and fix it when the original programmers are not around. Think about how to design your programs to make it easier for those who will maintain it after you. Know how long it takes your computer to execute an instruction, fetch a word from memory with and without a cache miss, read consecutive words from disk, and seek to a new location on disk. It could be the ANSI C committee, or it could be deciding if your local coding style will have 2 or 4 space indentation levels. Either way, you learn about what other people like in a language, how deeply they feel so, and perhaps even a little about why they feel so. Have the good sense to get off the language standardization effort as quickly as possible. With all that in mind, its questionable how far you can get just by book learning. Before my first child was born, I read all the How To books, and still felt like a clueless novice.
Instead, I relied on my personal experience, which turned out to be far more useful and reassuring to me than the thousands of pages written by experts. Fred Brooks, in his essay No Silver Bullets identified a three-part plan for finding great software designers: Systematically identify top designers as early as possible. Assign a career mentor to be responsible for the development of the prospect and carefully keep a career file. Provide opportunities for growing designers to interact and stimulate each other. This assumes that some people already have the qualities necessary for being a great designer;
Lave, Jean, Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life , Cambridge University Press, 1988. Answers Timing for various operations on a typical 1GHz PC in summer 2001: execute single instruction 1 nsec 1/1,000,000,000 sec fetch word from L1 cache memory 2 nsec fetch word from main memory 10 nsec fetch word from consecutive disk location 200 nsec fetch word from new disk location seek 8,000,000nsec 8msec . Footnotes This page also available in Japanese translation thanks to Yasushi Murakawa, in Chinese translation thanks to Xiaogang Guo, in Spanish translation thanks to Carlos Rueda and in German translation thanks to Stefan Ram.
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