| There's a popular viewpoint I think from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers[0] that could possibly be summarised as "any non-trivial skill takes at least 10,000 hours of practice to approach mastery." I think this applies especially to programming[1]. I can still vaguely remember a time, many years ago now where I just couldn't get my head around a garden variety "for" loop. Now I wonder what was so hard to understand about it. Many times over the years since those early "for" loops I have often felt that I wasn't really making any progress at all in grokking this programming thing. I look back now and in fact that was an illusion generated by a localised point of view. In fact I was making progress the whole time, just slowly enough that at times it didn't feel like it. I probably came at things from a fairly opposite place to you, I started with the web. I started with HTML and CSS and kind of worked backwards. But regardless of where you start, there will always be challenges to your understanding. IMO, one thing that marks a promising developer is the ability to be comfortable with feeling like an idiot while you're learning something new but continuing to persevere, because the need to learn new things happens so often in our relatively young industry. In my experience, few people truly are able to be comfortable with this feeling, but those who are able can surmount amazing obstacles. So don't get discouraged if it feels like you're not making progress. Stick with it, you will. It just won't seem like it at the time. As you've experienced, the MVC pattern is still very much in ascendance in the web dev world. I would suggest that you invest in a couple of good books (if available) or lengthy tutorials on the framework of your choice (if available). If neither of these things are available, that may be a sign that you should choose a different framework. :) Don't invest in too many books though, because you'll find they date quite quickly and eventually it will become more efficient to just search for what you need on a case-by-case basis. But to get a good grounding, dropping a bit of coin can be a good thing in the early stages of learning a new technology. 0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book) 1. http://norvig.com/21-days.html |