To make things short I would like to hear your opinions/experience is this really possible? Learning programming is not an easy task, as there so many different concepts to learn, design
patterns, syntax, API's,
testing, debugging and so on . Somebody has given a link to this
site which has shed some light on this subject, and I'm thinking it truly takes ten years to master programming (in any language). But the question is, is that can you do it all by yourself? without any guidance or assistance? Sure, if you are enthusiastic and feel confident in yourself, why not?. But sometimes I see that there is so much information that is difficult to grasp without any help. I work on a very comfortable job, I work early hours in the morning and finish my job by the afternoon, so I can say, that I have much free time. But the problem is, is that I don't have any control over my time or any sort of management how I learn things. As many of of you might guessed I'm learning
java, so one day I'm, learning howto use
JDBC, then i'm tempting to learn AWT basics, then again i'm interested how networking works in java. I always found learning syntax and various API's easy, this is just how technology works, but I see that I have missed so much information like: data structures and algorithms, set theory, boolean logic and so on. Heck, I didn't even who
Boole was. I like what i'm learning, but books alone can't help you out? Or can they? I know, many of you may provide a simple answer: just go to college/tech/university whatever, but unfortunately I cannot afford that right now, and I don't want to risk taking any student loans (especially in my country).
So any self-learners out there?