A big problem of learning any programming language "in an afternoon" is dodging all the cargo-cult bad advise on the internet. If you know what's bad advice it'

A big problem of learning any programming language "in an afternoon" is dodging all the cargo-cult bad advise on the internet. If you know what's bad advice it's easy but when you start from 0, any tutorial looks equally legit and you might end up a week in a rabbit hole that is more destructive than productive. An experienced programmer knows when to stop googling, when to use classes from the standard library and when to roll your own algorithm. A beginner does not and can easily start writing their own timezone-handling class or spend a day finding and configuring a package on npm that could be written in 3 lines yourself. So in hindsight it feels like you should have been able to learn all this in an afternoon, but the road there is actually tougher than you remember.