I like this: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years. Peter Norvig shows why that is how long it takes. Via grockwel.
It reminds me of a class I took in jazz improvisation with Torgrim Sollid, probably the most well-respected teacher of instrumental jazz in Norway. (Listen to or buy his music.) He handed out four pages of Lenny Tristano's scale exercises, and said:
"You need to practice the root, subdominant and dominant scale as well as the three parallel minor scales of every key. Practice it as scales, thirds, fourths and fifths. Play the scales in all octaves you can on your instrument, two, three, or four. Then you move on to the Tristano exercises."
(Tristano used to warm up by picking a small motif, and playing it on every step of a few different scales. Then he altered the rhythm by playing the motif of every beat and offbeat of the bar, and then changed the meter.)
Then Sollid added, calmly: "It takes two years. You just have to put it in. Two years, then you know it."
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