Some homepages are just cool. Some people really have something to say. Peter norvig (www.norvig.com) is one of them. I just spent more than one hour reading articles on his personal website and in the end, I promissed myself to return.

Of the many cool articles he has on his website is Teach yourself programming in Ten Years. In it Peter argues that book-titles such as “Teach yourself [whatever] in [anymany] days” are meaningless at most. And indeed it is strange that learning a new programming language seems to be one of the few tasks that one can learn in [whatever] days.

Well actually I am exagerating, I remember somebody telling me that over christmas she had an intensive martial arts course… And when I heard that, I laughed at all those old-fashioned Japanese masters who needed to dedicate all their lives to the art…

Eh, go and read the article, it’s much better than this rant :) To try to persuade you if it did not work, i paste one of my favourite parts of the article:

Researchers (Hayes, Bloom) have shown that it takes about ten years (n.b., emphasis is mine) 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 with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967.