Hello,

I am starting to learn programming seriously. I have taken a couple of courses in programming - a High School course that taught Turbo Pascal 7, a college Engineering programming course (didn't really learn anything), and a college course in Visual Basic where the only thing I learned was how to get a program to work with a minimum of actual writing code. So, my question is how long might it take me to learn to program competently? I will be mostly learning on my own, until this Fall when I may be able to afford to return to the University, so what time frame should I try to adhere to? How long until I can write programs that will be of use to me or to others or help out on projects?

It takes years to become a competent programmer... most programmers hack. There are wizkids and gurus but just because you have clever ideas and encyclopedias worth of knowledge doesn't make you competent at programming...

Pascal is a good programming language for learning - it teaches syntax, structures, concepts well but is not ideal for application or utility writing... VB is for simple Windows application programming...

To teach yourself and be motivated, you need to find 'something to program for'. This should drive you to learn techniques and concepts as well as getting you to problem solve.. For example, say you decide to write a program to display JPEGs. Imagine what you have to learn to be able to do this...

Your choice of programming language would affect what you learn too. Take JPEG example above, if you use VB then there might be library routines for you to use without knowing what the JPEG format is... so if you go down this route you will never learn what bitmap is, or the display co-ordinate system, and how to manipulate those structures... Whereas if you wrote it in C or C++, etc you might have to learn display drawing techniques and concepts...

The way to learn to program is start small and build up a body of work which covers many concepts... and from which you tweak and improve and re-use constantly...

JMJ, I'd say it really depends on 5 things (in no particular order) :

1. how interested you are,
2. how much experience in programming you already have,
3. how naturally good your brain is at programming-type stuff,
4. how much time you have to dedicate toward learning the stuff, and
5. how good the docs are for your particular programming language/platform of choice.

So, it's difficult to answer your question with so many variables that can vary so widely. If you're smart, interested, have lots of spare time, have a little experience already, and choose a language with good docs available, you can be writing simple useful programs in a few weeks.

Now, helping out on other projects will come later, since, for that, you need know-how in a number of other areas besides programming (like using diff & patch, version control, maybe a debugger). You'll also need to become proficient with your editor of choice to be able to work fast enough for it to be worthwhile. Also, it takes time to be able to consistently program without making simple mistakes (which can slow you down enough to make it not worthwhile).