Daryl Richter bio photo

Daryl Richter

:: ~winter-paches
:::: Heaven's Cavalry Rider
  :: Ancient Celestial Mariner
  :: Technological Engineer
  :: Modern Reactionary

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Here’s a quote from the legendary Peter Norvig

“Walk into any bookstore, and you’ll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 7 Days alongside endless variations offering to teach Visual Basic, Windows, the Internet, and so on in a few days or hours. I did the following power search at Amazon.com :

pubdate: after 1992 and title: days and (title: learn or title: teach yourself) and got back 248 hits.

The first 78 were computer books (number 79 was Learn Bengali in 30 days).

I replaced “days” with “hours” and got remarkably similar results: 253 more books, with 77 computer books followed by Teach Yourself Grammar and Style in 24 Hours at number 78. Out of the top 200 total, 96% were computer books.

The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about computers, or that computers are somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. There are no books on how to learn Beethoven, or Quantum Physics, or even Dog Grooming in a few days.”