Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Peter Norvig

Why is everyone in such a rush?            Translations

Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours Thanks to the
alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so following authors,
on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [title: teach, yourself, translations of this
hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books. Of the top ten, nine are page are available in:
programming books (the other is about bookkeeping). Similar results come from
replacing "teach yourself" with "learn" or "hours" with "days." Arabic
(Mohamed A. Yahya)
The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about programming,
or that programming is somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else.
Felleisen et al. give a nod to this trend in their book How to Design Programs,
when they say "Bad programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if
they are dummies." The Abtruse Goose comic also had their take. Bulgarian
(Boyko Bantchev)
Let's analyze what a title like Teach Yourself C++ in 24 Hours could mean:

Teach Yourself: In 24 hours you won't have time to write several significant
programs, and learn from your successes and failures with them. You won't
have time to work with an experienced programmer and understand what it
is like to live in a C++ environment. In short, you won't have time to learn Chinese
much. So the book can only be talking about a superficial familiarity, not a (Xiaogang Guo)
deep understanding. As Alexander Pope said, a little learning is a dangerous
thing.

C++: In 24 hours you might be able to learn some of the syntax of C++ (if
you already know another language), but you couldn't learn much about how Croatian
to use the language. In short, if you were, say, a Basic programmer, you (Tvrtko Bedekovic)
could learn to write programs in the style of Basic using C++ syntax, but
you couldn't learn what C++ is actually good (and bad) for. So what's the
point? Alan Perlis once said: "A language that doesn't affect the way you
think about programming, is not worth knowing". One possible point is that
you have to learn a tiny bit of C++ (or more likely, something like Esperanto
JavaScript or Processing) because you need to interface with an existing tool (Federico Gobbo)
to accomplish a specific task. But then you're not learning how to program;
you're learning to accomplish that task.

in 24 Hours: Unfortunately, this is not enough, as the next section shows.

French
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (Etienne Beauchesne)

Researchers (Bloom (1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes (1989), Simmon &
Chase (1973)) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a
wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph German
operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in (Stefan Ram)
neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it
again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your
current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and
correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real
shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years Hebrew
before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles (Eric McCain)
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.
Malcolm Gladwell has popularized the idea, although he concentrates on 10,000 Hindi
hours, not 10 years. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004) had another metric: "Your (Vikash Tiwari)
first 10,000 photographs are your worst." (He didn't anticipate that with digital
cameras, some people can reach that mark in a week.) True expertise may take a
lifetime: Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) said "Excellence in any department can be
attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price."
And Chaucer (1340-1400) complained "the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne." Hungarian
Hippocrates (c. 400BC) is known for the excerpt "ars longa, vita brevis", which is (Marton Mestyan)
part of the longer quotation "Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps,
experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile", which in English renders as "Life
is short, [the] craft long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment
difficult." Of course, no single number can be the final answer: it doesn't seem
reasonable to assume that all skills (e.g., programming, chess playing, checkers Indonesian
playing, and music playing) could all require exactly the same amount of time to (Tridjito Santoso)
master, nor that all people will take exactly the same amount of time. As Prof. K.
Anders Ericsson puts it, "In most domains it's remarkable how much time even the
most talented individuals need in order to reach the highest levels of performance.
The 10,000 hour number just gives you a sense that we're talking years of 10 to 20
hours a week which those who some people would argue are the most innately Italian
talented individuals still need to get to the highest level." (Fabio Z. Tessitore)

So You Want to be a Programmer

Here's my recipe for programming success: Japanese
(yomoyomo)
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 your ten
years/10,000 hours.

Program. The best kind of learning is learning by doing. To put it more

technically, "the maximal level of performance for individuals in a given Korean (John Hwang)
domain is not attained automatically as a function of extended experience,
but the level of performance can be increased even by highly experienced
individuals as a result of deliberate efforts to improve." (p. 366) and "the
most effective learning requires a well-defined task with an appropriate
difficulty level for the particular individual, informative feedback, and Persian
opportunities for repetition and corrections of errors." (p. 20-21) The book (Mehdi Asgari)
Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life is
an interesting reference for this viewpoint.

Talk with other programmers; read other programs. This is more important
than any book or training course. Polish
(Kuba Nowak)
If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate school).
This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will
give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don't enjoy school,
you can (with some dedication) get similar experience on your own or on the
job. In any case, book learning alone won't be enough. "Computer science Portuguese
education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than (Augusto Radtke)
studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter" says
Eric Raymond, author of The New Hacker's Dictionary. One of the best
programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot
of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock
options to buy his own nightclub. Romanian
(Ştefan Lazăr)
Work on projects with other programmers. Be the best programmer on
some projects; be the worst on some others. When you're the best, you get to
test your abilities to lead a project, and to inspire others with your vision.
When you're the worst, you learn what the masters do, and you learn what
they don't like to do (because they make you do it for them). Russian
(Konstantin Ptitsyn)
 Work on projects after other programmers. Understand a program written
by someone else. 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 them after you.
Serbian
Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Include one language (Lazar Kovacevic)
that emphasizes class abstractions (like Java or C++), one that emphasizes
functional abstraction (like Lisp or ML or Haskell), one that supports
syntactic abstraction (like Lisp), one that supports declarative specifications
(like Prolog or C++ templates), and one that emphasizes parallelism (like
Clojure or Go). Spanish
(Carlos Rueda)
Remember that there is a "computer" in "computer science". 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. (Answers here.)
Slovak
Get involved in a language standardization effort. It could be the ANSI (Jan Waclawek)
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.
Turkish
Have the good sense to get off the language standardization effort as quickly (Çağıl Uluşahin)
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. 30 Months later, when my second child was due, did I go back to
the books for a refresher? No. Instead, I relied on my personal experience, which Ukranian
turned out to be far more useful and reassuring to me than the thousands of pages (Oleksii
written by experts. Molchanovskyi)

Fred Brooks, in his essay No Silver Bullet identified a three-part plan for finding
great software designers:

1. Systematically identify top designers as early as possible.

2. Assign a career mentor to be responsible for the development of the prospect

and carefully keep a career file.

3. 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; the job is to properly coax them along. Alan Perlis put it more
succinctly: "Everyone can be taught to sculpt: Michelangelo would have had to be
taught how not to. So it is with the great programmers". Perlis is saying that the
greats have some internal quality that transcends their training. But where does the
quality come from? Is it innate? Or do they develop it through diligence? As
Auguste Gusteau (the fictional chef in Ratatouille) puts it, "anyone can cook, but
only the fearless can be great." I think of it more as willingness to devote a large
portion of one's life to deliberative practice. But maybe fearless is a way to
summarize that. Or, as Gusteau's critic, Anton Ego, says: "Not everyone can
become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere."

So go ahead and buy that Java/Ruby/Javascript/PHP book; you'll probably get

some use out of it. But you won't change your life, or your real overall expertise as
a programmer in 24 hours or 21 days. How about working hard to continually
improve over 24 months? Well, now you're starting to get somewhere...
References
Bloom, Benjamin (ed.) Developing Talent in Young People, Ballantine, 1985.

Brooks, Fred, No Silver Bullets, IEEE Computer, vol. 20, no. 4, 1987, p. 10-19.

Bryan, W.L. & Harter, N. "Studies on the telegraphic language: The acquisition of
a hierarchy of habits. Psychology Review, 1899, 8, 345-375

Hayes, John R., Complete Problem Solver Lawrence Erlbaum, 1989.

Chase, William G. & Simon, Herbert A. "Perception in Chess" Cognitive

Psychology, 1973, 4, 55-81.

Lave, Jean, Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday

Life, Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Answers
Approximate timing for various operations on a typical PC:

execute typical instruction 1/1,000,000,000 sec = 1 nanosec

fetch from L1 cache memory 0.5 nanosec
branch misprediction 5 nanosec
fetch from L2 cache memory 7 nanosec
Mutex lock/unlock 25 nanosec
fetch from main memory 100 nanosec
send 2K bytes over 1Gbps network 20,000 nanosec
read 1MB sequentially from memory 250,000 nanosec
fetch from new disk location (seek) 8,000,000 nanosec
read 1MB sequentially from disk 20,000,000 nanosec
send packet US to Europe and back 150 milliseconds = 150,000,000 nanosec

Appendix: Language Choice

Several people have asked what programming language they should learn first.
There is no one answer, but consider these points:

Use your friends. When asked "what operating system should I use,
Windows, Unix, or Mac?", my answer is usually: "use whatever your friends
use." The advantage you get from learning from your friends will offset any
intrinsic difference between OS, or between programming languages. Also
consider your future friends: the community of programmers that you will
be a part of if you continue. Does your chosen language have a large
growing community or a small dying one? Are there books, web sites, and
online forums to get answers from? Do you like the people in those forums?
Keep it simple. Programming languages such as C++ and Java are designed
for professional development by large teams of experienced programmers
who are concerned about the run-time efficiency of their code. As a result,
these languages have complicated parts designed for these circumstances.
You're concerned with learning to program. You don't need that
complication. You want a language that was designed to be easy to learn and
remember by a single new programmer.
 Play. Which way would you rather learn to play the piano: the normal,
interactive way, in which you hear each note as soon as you hit a key, or
"batch" mode, in which you only hear the notes after you finish a whole
song? Clearly, interactive mode makes learning easier for the piano, and also
for programming. Insist on a language with an interactive mode and use it.

Given these criteria, my recommendations for a first programming language would

be Python or Scheme. Another choice is Javascript, not because it is perfectly
well-designed for beginners, but because there are so many online tutorials for it,
such as Khan Academy's tutorial. But your circumstances may vary, and there are
other good choices. If your age is a single-digit, you might prefer Alice or Squeak
or Blockly (older learners might also enjoy these). The important thing is that you
choose and get started.

Appendix: Books and Other Resources

Several people have asked what books and web pages they should learn from. I
repeat that "book learning alone won't be enough" but I can recommend the
following:

Scheme: Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Abelson &

Sussman) is probably the best introduction to computer science, and it does
teach programming as a way of understanding the computer science. You
can see online videos of lectures on this book, as well as the complete text
online. The book is challenging and will weed out some people who perhaps
could be successful with another approach.
Scheme: How to Design Programs (Felleisen et al.) is one of the best books
on how to actually design programs in an elegant and functional way.
Python: Python Programming: An Intro to CS (Zelle) is a good introduction
using Python.
Python: Several online tutorials are available at Python.org.
Oz: Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming (Van
Roy & Haridi) is seen by some as the modern-day successor to Abelson &
Sussman. It is a tour through the big ideas of programming, covering a wider
range than Abelson & Sussman while being perhaps easier to read and
follow. It uses a language, Oz, that is not widely known but serves as a basis
for learning other languages. <

Notes
T. Capey points out that the Complete Problem Solver page on Amazon now has
the "Teach Yourself Bengali in 21 days" and "Teach Yourself Grammar and Style"
books under the "Customers who shopped for this item also shopped for these
items" section. I guess that a large portion of the people who look at that book are
coming from this page. Thanks to Ross Cohen for help with Hippocrates.

Peter Norvig (Copyright 2001—2014)

14 Comments norvig.com 
1 Login

 Recommend 7 t Tweet f Share Sort by Best

Join the discussion…

LOG IN WITH
OR SIGN UP WITH DISQUS ?
 Name

Dinesh Bishnoi • 5 years ago

Your article cleared a lot of misconception about learning programming.

i come here to decide whether to jump and into the field or not, actually
for personal use, and not as a profession. Now it seem to be a long
unknown path. Should I hire somebody to accomplish my programming
needs? Still a question.
3△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

dongwook kim • 5 months ago

Korean translation site link looks broken.
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Joe Njenga • a year ago

This is a masterpiece . Thanks for such great advice.
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Stella • 2 years ago

Thank you for the article. I would say it is still relevant today in 2017.
And in fact to learn to program by myself helps me in doing other things
as well.
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Michael Stueben • 3 years ago

Add a date (after the title) for this excellent article.
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Emiliano Zapata II • 3 years ago

What is your opinion on the online programming classes on sites such
as udacity?
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Zayn Ul Abdin > Emiliano Zapata II • 2 years ago

Here is his Course on Udacity
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Santo • 4 years ago

Molto utile per chi deve iniziare
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

William Rance • 4 years ago

hi Dinesh
To give you my two bits worth - The problem with programming it is not
transparent. That is by hiring someone you are no longer in control of
the process and thus what he/she claims at the interview may not be
forthcoming.
If your are not under a time pressure which would seem not be the case
then do it yourself - pick a tried and relatively easier language such as C
(which has available many libraries which can be obtained free).
However you should take a short course especially on pointers &
references. Once understood and with some experience you can then
move into C++. If you feel up to it go for C++ from the beginning for
which you can still program in C syntax
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

William Rance • 4 years ago

I fully agree with the article in fact i would take it further which I say from
my own experience working in the engineering, manufacturing & project
industries as a professional engineer
That is to have a degree of competency in your selected work it should
be recognized that after graduation in your early and mid twenties that
you are really serving an apprenticeship until you are about 40 years of
age. Young people tend to see things in black & white but shades of
grey appear which make you perform and make better decisions based
on the experience gained.
However since the 1980's industry in general appears to be reluctant to
employ older persons and in the field of programming this inexperience
results in projects not being realized in the agreed way.
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

wedding venues in mass • 4 years ago

This was enlightening. I'm just starting off my learning and this was a big
help. Thanks!
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

NotesTracker (Tony Austin) • 4 years ago

Oh so true! I started programming in the mid-to-late 1960s, and am just
beginning to understand a little bit about it all.
△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Макс • 4 years ago

Клевая статья, заставляет задуматься))) Спасибо)))