Popular conceit about learning programming languages

[engsol at teleport.com]

<snip a lot of good stuff>

I, for one, find this thread very interesting. It's nice to learn that other people have
different rates of learning.

My personal observations/comments are:

I too can pick up a programming book, and in a a couple of evenings, do the "simple"
stuff...like for loops, procedures, etc. But I always seen to hit a leveling off (or
several) in the learning curve.. I can't seem to progress in the sense of expressing a
programming task in terms of the current lanquage of interest, until, (and this is a big
UNTIL) I see a book which explains concepts in a way that makes the light go on.

One example....I'm a fair C programmer. When C++ became popular, I read the usual books
"Learn C++ in 10 microseconds", but I never really grasped the concepts of OOP nor
classes. So I shunned them. Then along came Python..and the light dawned. It wasn't the
first Python book I read, not the 8th..it was the 9th that broke my personal learning dam.
Why? Because it explained the process and offered concepts that stuck, and to me, made
sense.

Another example: I was using Python to do some heavy duty parsing and report generation of
log files. I knew I needed to use regular expressions, so I hacked at it. Some things
worked, others didn't. I was getting frustrated. Then I found "Mastering Regular
Expressions" by Jeffery E.F. Friedl. Bingo! I learned more in the first 2-3 chapters than
all the other books combined.

I was happy to see that others cringe at their early code when they revisited it later.
LOL..welcome to the club.

Regards,
Norm