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Whatever time frames you apply, the only way to really learn a language is to use it. Reading a book, blog articles, and watching videos on YouTube won't give you the hands on experience necessary to internalize how everything works.


Of course. My methodology is usually this:

Day 1: read the introduction of a book, set up editor and environment

Day 2: (superficially) learn flow control and type system

Day 3: practice with coding problems on codewars

Day 4-7: reimplement one of my projects

Week 2: read the second quarter of the book and continue with puzzles

Week 3+: Just projects, maybe invest a day into tooling somewhere in between

That is assuming 1-3 hour days


> read the second quarter of the book

And then never get to the third and fourth quarters because the practise you get from actually typing stuff is far more valuable? :)


Exactly. There usually is some stuff about the deeper, darker corners of a language in the type of book I pick.

I usually pick the authoritative book / advanced book. Think "Programming PHP", "The joy of clojure", "The C Programming Language", etc. I don't necessarily need to know all about performance optimization, the async model or non-html templating.

Reading a technical book cover to cover feels wasteful imo


True, but actually reading a book about the language to understand the philosophy behind it and its trade offs speeds up the process enormously.




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