Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 7 Days alongside endless variations offering to teach Visual Basic, Windows, the Internet, and so on in a few days or hours. I did the following power search at Amazon.com:
走進任何一家書店，你都會看到如Teach Yourself Java in 7 Days（七天內學會JAVA）一整排看不見盡頭的類似書籍，學會Visual Basic, Windows, the Internet之類在幾天或幾個小時內，我曾在Amazon.com做過以下搜尋：
pubdate: after 1992 and title: days and (title: learn or title: teach yourself)
（1992年後出版 標題含有days 與 (學習 或 自學)）
and got back 248 hits. The first 78 were computer books (number 79 was Learn Bengali in 30 days). I replaced "days" with "hours" and got remarkably similar results: 253 more books, with 77 computer books followed by Teach Yourself Grammar and Style in 24 Hours at number 78. Out of the top 200 total, 96% were computer books.
The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about computers, or that computers are somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. There are no books on how to learn Beethoven, or Quantum Physics, or even Dog Grooming in a few days.
Let's analyze what a title like Learn Pascal in Three Days could mean:
我們來看看標題類似Learn Pascal in Three Days（三天內學會Pascal）可能是指：
Learn: In 3 days 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 that environment. In short, you won't have time to learn much. So they can only be talking about a superficial familiarity, not a deep understanding. As Alexander Pope said, a little learning is a dangerous thing.
學習：在三天內，你沒有足夠的時間寫一些有意義的程式，並從成功與失敗裡學習。你沒有時間與一些經驗老道的程式設計師一起工作並理解在那種環境下是什麼感覺。簡單來說，你沒有時間學到太多。所以書本只能討論一些皮毛，而不是有深度的理解。如Alexander Pope（譯註：Alexander Pope 英國詩人 1688-1744）所說，一知半解是相當危險的事（a little learning is a dangerous thing）
Pascal: In 3 days you might be able to learn the syntax of Pascal (if you already knew a similar language), but you couldn't learn much about how to use the syntax. In short, if you were, say, a Basic programmer, you could learn to write programs in the style of Basic using Pascal syntax, but you couldn't learn what Pascal 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 Pascal (or more likely, something like Visual Basic or JavaScript) because you need to interface with an existing tool to accomplish a specific task. But then you're not learning how to program; you're learning to accomplish that task.
Pascal：在三天內，你可能可以學會Pascal的語法（如果你已經學會類似的語言），不過你無法深入學會如何去使用那些語法。簡單來說，如果你是，比如說一名Basic的程式設計師，你能學會用Pascal的語法去撰寫出類似Basic風格的程式，但你卻學不會使用Pascal真正的優點（與缺點）。所以重點在哪？Alan Perlis（譯註：第一屆圖靈獎得主）曾說：「如果有一種程式語言無法影響你對程式設計的想法，那就不值得去學。（A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing）」。另一種可能性是，你必須學會少許的Pascal（或更多類似Visual Basic或JavaScript之類）因為你必須去使用現有的工具去完成一個特定的工作。但你不是去學習如何撰寫程式，而是去學習如何完成那個工作。
in Three Days: Unfortunately, this is not enough, as the next section shows
3天內：很不幸的，這是不夠的，就像下一段所說
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
十年內學會程式設計
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 operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in 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 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. Malcolm Gladwell reports that a study of students at the Berlin Academy of Music compared the top, middle, and bottom third of the class and asked them how much they had practiced:
Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same time - around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practised roughly the same amount - about two or three hours a week. But around the age of eight real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up as the best in their class began to practise more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the age of 20 they were practising well over 30 hours a week. By the age of 20, the elite performers had all totalled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students had totalled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours.
So it may be that 10,000 hours, not 10 years, is the magic number. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) thought it took longer: "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." Hippocrates (c. 400BC) is known for the excerpt "ars longa, vita brevis", which is 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." Although in Latin, ars can mean either art or craft, in the original Greek the word "techne" can only mean "skill", not "art".
所以也許需要一萬個小時才是魔術數字，而不是十年，Samuel Johnson(1709-1784)認為還需要更長：「要精通任何領域必須以一生去實現；無法少付任何代償（Excellence in any department can be attained only by the labor of a lifetime; it is not to be purchased at a lesser price.）」。而And Chaucer (1340-1400)亦抱怨說：「生命如此短暫，要掌握技藝卻如此長久（the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.）」
Hippocrates (c. 400BC)則摘錄了「Ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile」中的一部分「ars longa, vita brevis」，翻譯成英文為「Life is short, [the] craft long, opportunity fleeting, experiment treacherous, judgment difficult」（生命短暫，技藝遠長，機會短暫，實驗莫測，難以評判），而在拉丁語裡，「ars」可以指藝術或技藝，而在古希臘語裡，「techne」只能為「技藝」而不能為「藝術」
Here's my recipe for programming success:
這是我成功學習程式設計的訣竅
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 ten years.
對程式設計產生興趣，並在樂趣中去做。確認保持足夠的樂趣，讓你能投入十年。
Talk to other programmers; read other programs. This is more important than any book or training course.
與其他程式設計師交流；閱讀他人所撰寫的程式。這比任何書籍或訓練課程都來得重要
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 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 opportunities for repetition and corrections of errors." (p. 20-21) The book Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life is an interesting reference for this viewpoint.
程式，最好的學習方式就是在做中學。嚴格來說，「個人最高階層的專業領域成就，並不是在長期的經驗中去自動獲得，但即使是非常富有豐富經驗的個人也可以透過刻意的努力來提高表現水準」(p. 366)而且「最有效的學習必須透過為個人制定難度適當並為習得特定目標的工作，有益的回饋，並有機會反覆執行並糾正錯誤」(p. 20-21)，Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life（在練習中認識：心理 數學與日常生活的文化）是關於這觀點的一本有趣的參考書
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 the job. In any case, book learning alone won't be enough. "Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than 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.
如果你願意花四年在大學裡（或者是更多時間在研究所），那能讓你得到某些職業所需要的證書，而且可以使你對那個領域深入了解，但如果你並不喜歡學校，你可以（付出點犧牲）在那種工作中體驗到類似的經驗。在任何狀況下，但靠書本所學的都不夠多。「資訊科學教育不會讓任何人成為專業的程式設計師，就如同研究畫筆與顏料不會讓任何人成為專業畫家一樣」The New Hacker's Dictionary（新駭客字典）的作家，Eric Raymond說道。我曾雇用最優秀的程式設計師之一，他只有高中學歷；他撰寫出許多偉大的軟體，有他自己的新聞群組，而當他有了足夠的股票權值，他選擇買一家屬於他的夜總會。（譯註：指Jamie Zawinski，XEmacs和Netscape Navigator的作者，本譯註參照自http://www.javaresearch.org/article/12568.htm）
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).
Work on projects after other programmers. Be involved in understanding 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 it after you.
Learn at least a half dozen programming languages. Include one language that supports class abstractions (like Java or C++), one that supports functional abstraction (like Lisp or ML), one that supports syntactic abstraction (like Lisp), one that supports declarative specifications (like Prolog or C++ templates), one that supports coroutines (like Icon or Scheme), and one that supports parallelism (like Sisal).
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.)
Get involved in a language standardization effort. It could be the ANSI 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.
Have the good sense to get off the language standardization effort as quickly as possible
必須擁有能盡快從標準化工作中抽身的良好判斷力
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 turned out to be far more useful and reassuring to me than the thousands of pages written by experts.
Fred Brooks, in his essay No Silver Bullet identified a three-part plan for finding great software designers:
Fred Brooks在他的短文中「No Silver Bullet」（沒有銀彈）定義了三個發掘優秀程式設計師的步驟
Systematically identify top designers as early as possible.
盡早有系統的確認出高階設計師的群組
Assign a career mentor to be responsible for the development of the prospect and carefully keep a career file.
分配一位良師益友給有潛力與展望的對象協助其發展，並小心的保持他生涯的履歷
Provide opportunities for growing designers to interact and stimulate each other.
提供機會給成長中的設計師們互相交流與激勵
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".
So go ahead and buy that Java 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, days, or even months.
Several people have asked what programming language they should learn first. There is no one answer, but consider these points:
許多人都會問如何選擇他們應該學的第一個程式語言。這沒有一個固定的答案，但可以考慮這些重點
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. But your circumstances may vary, and there are other good choices. If your age is a single-digit, you might prefer Alice or Squeak (older learners might also enjoy these). The important thing is that you choose and get started.
