The real issue is not learning to code, it is learning to problem solve. That is the part that is hard.<p>I recently overheard a guy on the train talk about why he dropped CompSci as a major to his friend. He talked about the times where he would leave out a semicolon and the program would crash. And it would take hours for him to find the culprit. Leaving out the efficiency of his debugging, what I listened to more was the tone of his explanation. It was like a diatribe. His attitude was literally that any career where you have to worry about little things like semicolons was not the type of career for him. I suspect he had gone into the CompSci program because of the material benefits. And left once he discovered the devil is in the details. Programming is like weaving more than writing. I remember that he said he had switched majors to Business and loved it. Basically, he said CompSci was torture. Because he did not revel, like many of us do, in the sometimes long and backtracking path that we go through to write code. To make something, to weave lines of code into something tangible.
I use this exact approach and have also banged out not-entirely horrible code in >=1 month. I did this when I learned Rails.<p>I started with a couple basic 15 minute guides and then hammered myself from all directions incrementally switching between stuff like Hartl's guide, PeepCode, Railscast, etc.<p>I do find that learning from diverse sources really accelerates the learning process for me. It also breaks up the monotony of pounding through exercises in a single book.
Oh, man. I spent all this time reading about algorithms, mathematics, and Backus-Naur form when all I needed to do was watch Railscasts!<p>I guess I'm never getting that time back.
This looks like a good way to learn <i>about</i> coding in a month - a very important skill when you want to work with developers. But I'm doubtful it would provide any real proficiency ...<p>Anyone who's learned to code in a month able to say otherwise?
Don't forget to take notes in the form of a cheat sheet (or find a cheat sheet someone has already made). It's so easy to remember <i>what</i> was done in a tutorial without remembering <i>how</i> it was done in terms of keywords, etc.
You what I'd like to see more than "learn to code" sites/posts, is "learn to design" ones. I know there have been a couple but I think more of us here know how to code than do design well.
I'm gonna try this. Coding to me is mystifying even though I started in grade school. Later I met a hardware engineer/hacker when I was 18 and I decided then to focus on the business side even though I had made a few applications. He was so good at the math and the art of it that I never wanted to waste time to learn it properly. But I was lazy with it before all that. So I should challenge myself to this.
The two best things that let me learn Django (and some more-than-basic Python) were The Django Book and <i>IRC</i>.<p>IRC is a really, really, really good resource to learn something technical, and it is better in that it provides real-time help. It is the closest you can probably get to having someone guide you live short of having a friend to help you.