How I Taught Myself Python/Django in 8 Weekends

I'm seeing a lot of these posts lately, it reminds me of a Woody Allen joke:<p>Roughly "I'm taking a class on speed reading. I was able to read War and Peace in one night. It's about Russia."

Now the OP just need to teach himself programming in ten years [1] ;)<p>[1] <a href="http://norvig.com/21-days.html" rel="nofollow">http://norvig.com/21-days.html</a>

I love the meme I'm seeing lately in some of the articles like this, that "it's only been recently that it's been possible to teach yourself to program". Having flashbacks to 1981, personally. I'm sure some of you other oldsters are having flashbacks to the 70's. Yes, Virginia, it has been possible for a few decades now to teach yourself how to code, how computers work, and to write real software that people will pay you for. This is not a new phenomenon or new capability.

Good for you, keep it up! Produce some cool things, then learn some new tools, rinse and repeat :)

If it works to get people started then it works. I honestly don't remember how I got started programming - some people rhapsodize about that first moments coding, but for me it was mostly rage at a capricious Java compiler that I felt was always either finding a creative way to do something other than when it should or throwing an error completely unrelated to what was wrong.<p>After I got past that point everything was gravy. I've always been kind of confused by the learning curve metaphor (If the learning curve is steep, doesn't that mean you learn faster? What's the x and what's the y in this?) but tech now is getting closer to the ideal linear curve, where additional learning and productivity are at a relatively constant proportion no matter what stage you're at rather than being a floor function until you hit a certain level.<p>Which is awesome.

I would have titled this "How I taught Myself Enough Python/Django to do what I wanted in 8 weekends" ...there is so much to both of them, you can always learn more. But, you are indeed cruising, keep up the good work!

This post may not be perfect, but it's just what I've been looking for.

The more you know, the more you know you don't know.

Intermeresting.