How Long Does it Take to Learn Programming?

:confused: I know about 15 developers including myself and we all develop on a local host. Granted we all have hosting for production, but development is still done locally.

Doing it online will just slow you down wasting your time uploading to see your work. Not to mention a pain to debug.

Very good and detailed advice, Pomspot. You did sound like you really wanted to answer the question.

Thanks

Really?
I'm paid ~$50/h, I'm contracted out at ~$150/h. I know guys that contract direct at ~$100/h.

I worked with a guy who had a friend who specialised in mainframe optimisation. He got paid by the line, not the hour. $1000 per line added, $2000 per line removed. He worked seldom, but if you needed to do something like transform your batch processing job from 8 hours to 1 hour, he was pretty much the only person you'd call.

It depends on what you mean by 'long' and it depends on what you mean by 'a lot of money'.

The extent of my programming knowledge was a bit of old Sinclair BASIC from nearly 30 years ago, but when I got into Internet marketing I found there were things I needed to have a script to do for me.

Fortunately they were simple things and a good book on PHP taught me how to do them.

Armed with that small bit of knowledge - and the understanding that PHP is quite simple to learn - at least to do simple things - I set about writing more complicated scripts. And added to my knowledge in the process.

Within a few months I was confident enough to write a script that has now sold many thousands of dollars worth.

I think that to be a coder you have to have a love for all things analytical. Getting a script to work can sometimes be a real puzzle and a great challenge. But it is almost always solvable in the end, and each puzzle teaches you something new.

The 'how long' is probably unanswerable. You could learn enough PHP to write a simple working script in under half an hour, but to really get to grips with all the complex nicities of the language could take years.

The 'how much' question comes down to what you'll do with your knowledge. If you job yourself out writing scripts for other people you'll make money, for sure, but you will essentially be working for a wage. And any wage-based job has an upper limit on how much you can earn.

Conversely, if you can put in the same effort writing something useful that you can sell yourself, there is no upper limit. You work once and earn over and over again.

There are some excellent books you can buy on PHP, but before you do that, learn to love the online PHP Manual. It is free and extremely useful.

Martin

here are critical factors that I guess affects ones learning.
1. user learning capability
2. time
3. resources

if you have everything then it will be easy for you.

4 to 6 years.

Plenty. Just pick the programming language you're interested and get a "For Dummies" book or one of those "in 21 days" books.

Hi tonnele,

You might want to try w3schools dot com
I learn quite a bit from there on HTML, Javascript, XML, PHP, SQL, etc.

I think you will love it too!

Hi, I think you should start your programming from C because this is the only language which works as a base of all the languages and you can learn how to implement a logic for any program in C.

I don't think you can put a time limit on it. The more you learn, the more you discover......

Ask yourself what language would be fun and intresting to learn.

Exactly. How many hours per day? Have you already got a specific outcome in mind? That makes a huge difference. How many languages do you already know?

How do you define "learn"? That might be 10 hours, 100 hours, 1,000 hours, or 10,000 hours.

I'm at hmm, ~30,000 hours in my profession, about 18,000 hours of which I would consider programming time. I'm STILL learning, both new languages and new ways to use existing ones.