BookTour.com CTO James Somers wrote recently for The Atlantic about his multi-year struggle to learn programming. When he was a teenager, he started trying to learn with a book on C++.
“I imagined myself working montage-like through the book, smoothly accruing expertise one chapter at a time,” Somers wrote. “What happened instead is that I burned out after a week.” Somers writes that he repeated this process over and over again. He thought for a while that he just didn’t have the right kind of brain for programming.
Eventually, though, he discovered Project Euler and his relationship to programming changed.