Enough to be useful and -basic-? 2.5 years of self-study and classroom. Classroom gave some fundamentals while self-study gave practical techniques, and more importantly, a practical language to say 'I know'. School never covered one language long enough, never pushed into the underlying libraries.
No, really, I don't think you ever stop learning really, or you shouldn't at least. You might be able to attribute a length to how long it took you until you felt you were proficient. But it's all relative. I could say it took me 30 seconds to learn how to program because I could get something to return "Hello?" but is that really programming?
Agreed, I constantly look back on the work i have done in the past and think that i had no idea what i was doing. Learning to program is a skill to be honed continuously.
I learned to build web applications fairly quickly. Zero to a job doing it in less than a year. It's solving other peoples' problems that's the hard part. You only get better at it with experience across several projects - and that is where you keep learning, every day.
Sitting in Union Station after first quarter freshman year with a 10 hour wait for train, read the fortran text for the next quarter cover-to-cover several times. Was ready to go when class started after winter break.
I am still learning programming many years later after countless languages and many challenging projects.
This question is impossible to answer. There is a difference between learning and mastering. Learning is quick ('hello world' will takeless than a minute), while mastering depends on which language you're using, how fast you learn and how much time you devote.
Maybe you're just beginning with programming and you want a timeframe how long it will take you to be able to code something decent? My advice is not to stress too much about the 'how long'. Just begin building stuff, start easy in the beginning. Tackle problems as you encounter them, and constantly wonder 'how did they do this?' when you're using an app/website/whatever. Curiosity is a great teacher.
As for myself, I started coding (HTML, CSS, PHP) 7 years ago. Within a few months I was able to write a half-decent web app, but if I look back on the stuff I made back then it makes me want to cry, it's that bad... I got a lot better since, but I wouldn't say I've mastered it yet. Good luck!
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[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 37.5 ms ] threadEnough to be useful and -basic-? 2.5 years of self-study and classroom. Classroom gave some fundamentals while self-study gave practical techniques, and more importantly, a practical language to say 'I know'. School never covered one language long enough, never pushed into the underlying libraries.
No, really, I don't think you ever stop learning really, or you shouldn't at least. You might be able to attribute a length to how long it took you until you felt you were proficient. But it's all relative. I could say it took me 30 seconds to learn how to program because I could get something to return "Hello?" but is that really programming?
I am still learning programming many years later after countless languages and many challenging projects.
So I will give you a two part answer:
1) 10 hours 2) 46 years.
basic, who can remember. turbo basic, qbasic, pascal? all grade school...
flash took 1.5 years from flash 5, as2 to as3.
php, asp, don't think I ever got fluent enough to not have to refrence..
javascript and jquery took me about 2 months from novice to master. 4-6 months for everything html5 and css3 related.
still working on the objective c, c++, etc.
Maybe you're just beginning with programming and you want a timeframe how long it will take you to be able to code something decent? My advice is not to stress too much about the 'how long'. Just begin building stuff, start easy in the beginning. Tackle problems as you encounter them, and constantly wonder 'how did they do this?' when you're using an app/website/whatever. Curiosity is a great teacher.
As for myself, I started coding (HTML, CSS, PHP) 7 years ago. Within a few months I was able to write a half-decent web app, but if I look back on the stuff I made back then it makes me want to cry, it's that bad... I got a lot better since, but I wouldn't say I've mastered it yet. Good luck!
That's like asking "How long does it take to learn to play the guitar?" What like a monkey? or like Eric Clapton?
I've worked in many corporate IT departments with veterans with 10+ years "experience" who couldn't hold a match to a motivated 15 yo hacker.