| Let's talk about Chinese. Can you "learn" Mandarin by reading a few books on Mandarin, taking a few courses, attempting to read some books in Mandarin, and occasionally speaking a few words to that cute Chinese girl at work? Yes, you can "learn" Mandarin that way, but you can't Learn it. If you were REALLY passionate about learning Mandarin, you would have to go to China (or at least Chinatown) and stay a while. Then you would be driven to learn Mandarin because you would need huge chunks of it for very real things. NOT learning Mandarin would be more painful than learning it. You need a project. You need a project complex enough that you need huge chunks of programming knowledge to implement functionality. You need a project so interesting to you that it's more painful NOT to learn how to program than it would be to learn. UPDATE: One other thing. It's ALWAYS difficult to read other people's code. Always. This gets easier, but complex codebases always look like gobbledygook the first time you look at it. I've been programming for 20 years and this still happens to me. You get used to it. What's the strategy? How do you eat an elephant? |