rant/ramble, read at your own risk:
I literally have 4 Java for beginner programmer textbooks, and more online with Safari's bookshelf. So, information is not exactly a bottleneck for the rate of my learning. Maybe like Sir Newton said, I am simply not ambitious or hard working... Idk. I certainly
want to have programming skills, so I could essentially make the computer do whatever repetitive actions I'd like it to do. The computer is a powerful tool, and I'd love to be able to have control over that power. At the moment, I open up a textbook, and they just have theory and concepts, it just kills the fire inside of me. That's why I asked how long it should take to become an at least intermediate programmer, so I would know how much toil and frustration I would have to
endure prior to realizing some exciting fruit of my labor.
lovely possibility:
On a separate note, besides the obvious security risks, does anyone else see the immense learning/teaching benefits of a n00b like myself
working one to one through remote access (gotomeeting.com / logmein.com, etc.) for example
with an experienced programmer, say in an
IDE like eclipse with audio/webcam with Skype, helping to explain code and break apart complicated segments into simpler code, etc.
replies to previous posts:
I think my main problem is
knowing what I want or what goal to set for myself. That's why I thought if I start work on software I find useful I would be more driven to program and to learn the computer science / programming best practices / theory along the way. To your point, Sir Dittmer, I would say I do want to use Java in my applications, because my school's Comp Sci dept. uses Java for the first two semesters. To Sir Francis's point, I'm with you on the do something original that you care about, and obviously, if you're really good at programming you can customize any software ad-infinitum, making it unique. To Sir Newton's point, I knew someone was going to say, "how fast you learn depends on you", in any case, that's the info that would help me out, I guess I need more metacognition. I can do hello world easy, but I want to make useful stuff, and I know that also depends on my definition of "useful". I plan on looking at the GWT.