Picking up a language for me involves reading the O'Reily book cover to cover -- every single word. That way I get familiar enough with the language that I don

Picking up a language for me involves reading the O'Reily book cover to cover -- every single word. That way I get familiar enough with the language that I don't spend weeks doing things "the wrong way" just because I'm used to doing things a different way in another language. This, and the initial ramp-up time usually takes a few weeks. For really big languages like modern C++ it would probably take longer than for node or something like that.