The problem with my learning curve was I had wrong books to start learning 8051 instruction set.
no need to buy any book, the very best is chapter 2 of "the bible" concise, clesr and complete.

My other question was how long does take to learn to read other programmers code when they leave comments out on each line of code?
an eternity, there is no other answer. HOWEVER, if you have coded the same already yourself, you May (just may) have a chance of gathering some amall snippet of information from such code.

If I (with more years of experience than I wish to disclose) see uncommented code, I do not even bother looking at it. The time it takes to decipher it is longer than the time it takes to work whatever out yourself.

SO, again, if you have "sample code" - throw it out, or. at least, do not even look at it till you fully understand what you want to do and have done it.

It is so tempting to say "why reinvent the wheel" and the statement has some merit, but if the bolt holes do not fit your axle it is most often faster to "reinvent" than to try to understand and then modify.

After the examples in the getting started guide has given you the basics on structure and format, DO NOT consider "looking at code" a method of learning, it will teach you less than nothing

Erik