While looking around for articles on how to learn programming from a more abstract point of view, I came across the following article:
Teach yourself programming in ten years.
Go and read it, it’s thought-provoking.
It’s nine years old, and it’s every bit as relevant as if it had been written yesterday, and *that* is the scary part. The individual books have changed, and I’m sure that he’d add a few more ‘must read’ books to his resources, but other than that, it’s still extraordinarily relevant.
The most important point, IMHO, comes at the top of his list: Get interested in programming, and do some because it is fun. Make sure that it keeps being enough fun so that you will be willing to put in ten years.
I loved this article… but it’s not relevant to me.
I don’t want to invest ten years before I achieve anything – I don’t have ten years to spare. On the other hand, I don’t want to become a professional programmer (I’ve done application development for a living; it’s not a career path for me), I have no interest in learning several languages just for the sake of it, I don’t have the time or money to get a computer science degree.
I might sound precariously close to the person who only wants to learn to conduct a single symphony, but for me, this *is* a hobby. I want to learn to write Cocoa applications for my Mac (or the iPhone/iPad). Nor is ‘working with other programmers’ a practical suggestion for me. Right now, I can’t do anything at all, I struggle with the simplest tasks. Opening windows and connecting core data to tables and text fields (but not yet an NSTextView!) is as much as I _can_ do. I’m hoping to eventually meet people willing to help me… but right now, I have nothing at all to offer, and I don’t want to be a liability. I’d love to work with other prople new to Cocoa, but, really, what I want more than anything else is _learning materials that work_. It’s unfair to ask people to teach me things I can learn on my own; and I don’t want to do it unless I have used the resources I have.
Also, and maybe this is closer to the point, I don’t need more input right now; I’m confused enough.