Ask HN: Is this book lying about taking only 20 hours to learn programming?

Am I missing something?

I get his point that we don't need to spend 10,000 hours to master something.

But , 20 hours? A marketing point to sell a book may be? (cynicism overspill here).

I have read chapter 5 of his book "The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast! by Josh Kaufman (Jun 6, 2013)"

In it he described the process of how he went about breaking down and defining a programming problem and researching solutions and deciding which tools {out of a myriad of choices} to use for the job and downloading and installing tools and coding a Wordpress replacement solution using Sinatra and Jekyll etc.

For the scope of his programming project, see "Deconstructing the End Result" at : http://tinyurl.com/ocm4kua

Along the way in his 20 hours journey a coder wannabe like me is introduced to new programming tools and concepts such as:

git, Sinatra, Heroku, Jekyll, DataMapper, Rake , framework , state etc.

He described how he researched and decided to reject using Ruby on Rails in favor of Sinatra; rejected Postgres in favor of DataMapper ; rejected Python in favor of using Ruby ; choosing Heroku instead of alternatives ; making complicated choices along the way.

All these in 20 hours.

Granted, he went into the project already knowing how to deal with html and css and maintaining server issues that host his website http://personalmba.com --- none of these skills I possess.

In case you don't know who Josh Kaufman is, take a look at this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY

..........Another question :

If you were to study computer programming again, how would you go about shortening your learning curve?

..........tl;dr: Is it really possible for a newbie to learn programming in 20 hours or less to solve a programming issue?

What resources or advice would you use or what pitfalls would you avoid to get to the end goal of learning programming faster?

Thanks a million.