How much time in a week a programmer should spend on coding and learning

while (true) {
   learn;
   code;
}

When I first started programming, it seems that I learn new things by leaps and bounds. Functions, classes, inheritance and etc. But after a while, I realize that you learn by coding. I load myself up with tonnes of reading material - Effective C++, Modern C++, but nothing beats them when I actually sat down and code.

Of course, writing your code the same way over and over again does not make you a better programmer. You have to learn to think - how do I make it reusable? less error prone? portable? immune to changes in other areas of the application? easier to maintain? Is there a better way to do this?

Eventually, the learning peaks, and what you learn are what I like to term as multipliers. It's like knowing that dirname(__FILE__) in PHP returns the current directory which an include file is in. It's like finding out what's a ORM and how by abstracting away the DB you can focus more on the code logic rather than an endless routines of writing INSERTS and UPDATEs SQL statements. It's like learning smart pointers and effective use of STL in C++, using Firebug effectively when doing JavaScript/CSS/HTML...and lots more.

So code; once you get frustrated about something ("There must be a better way to do this than now!"), search for a better way - this is how I learn, anyway.

Surely you've realized that putting a finite measurement on the amount of time you should spend coding, is futile and hugely irrelevant.

Do what you want, but always try and keep up to date.

I have two friends in my university, both studying media informatics, and both were absolute beginners in programming.

The first one reads a lot at home if he has to learn new languages for a project but has never had a private programming project.

The second one reads a bit but has his own python project. A web application for his friends, where you can bet on soccer results.

Both in comparison:
The first guy is slow in programming and always stumble upon simple things and his code can be optimized (in line numbers and comments) at least by 5. And in two days he will stumble upon the same issue again...
The second guy is much faster, can easily read foreign code and languages and stumble upon one problem at most two times, the third time he used what he has learned....

So imho, doing your own project, where you code because you love it, where you work until morning to fix a bug or to finish an implementation, is the very best way to learn!