[EasyCompany]

Lets see.....i am 30yrs old, worked in marketing for a fortune 50 company and worked as a trader. Started Jan of this learning to program.......Ruby, rails, Javascript and until about two weeks ago Dojo. I enjoy it thoroughly, its like i am sitting down to watch Lord of the Rings. I am by no means find myself worthy of been called a programmer, but i started developing a little cellphone app targeting developing countries, its going really well, still coding it.

What i found is that there is so much help, so many places to find the answer if u can research. Just reading the source code, Readme docs, chat rooms, is so much help. Cookbooks, tutorials by bloggers are all helping me along. Also, you can create so much with just a little technical skills. At the end, you still have to run a business, be a hustler. So when i launch my little application, i will try and get some talent on board as well(if i am lucky). The key is to achieve a lot with a little.

I almost forgot......Google developer tools, has sped up my learning so so much, reading the source code of websites and looking at all the scripts. Its just amazing the resources available today vs 5yrs ago.

[BvS]

Would be great if you could give a little insight how exactly you started (which books, online tutorials... ) and in which order. Would you have done something differently?

[astrofinch]

This is probably the best way to learn to program:

http://www.amazon.com/Python-Programming-Introduction-Comput...

If you're too poor to pay for it this book is available free online:

http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html

This is probably the best place to get started with HTML and CSS:

http://htmldog.com/

Once you know regular CSS, if you're going to be designing your own sites, you should start using this (little known secret weapon):

http://compass-style.org/

I'd say once you understand all that stuff, learn Django

http://www.djangoproject.com/

and go ahead and build your first web application. You won't know Javascript yet, which will seriously limit the slickness of your interface, but that's alright for your first effort. These guys supposedly make deployment really easy:

http://www.webfaction.com/

Here's the best Javascript stuff I know:

http://yuiblog.com/crockford/ (download with netvideohunter firefox extension and watch sped-up with vlc, [ and ] keys control speed. I wish I'd taken notes.)

http://jquery.com/

http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/

If you've got capital you can hire other people to do design:

http://99designs.com/

http://www.designcontest.net/

http://www.designcrowd.com/

There are a lot of services on the internet that will convert PSD (photoshop) documents that 99designs guys make in to xhtml and css for a few hundred dollars. So you don't have to go deep in to design if you don't want to.

I wish I'd installed Ubuntu and learned to use the command line earlier; otherwise I wouldn't have gotten frustrated when trying to install software. I'd say once you've got Ubuntu running, read everything under Linux on this page:

http://code.google.com/edu/tools101/index.html

Normally you want to be learning things on a just-in-time-basis, so you're learning something in order to apply it to some project. But system administration isn't like that because you don't know what you need to know.

As for regrets: I think I would have learned a lot faster if I'd given myself designated study hours. Probably half an hour a day to start, with gradual increase. Also, I shouldn't have been so hesitant to register for accounts and ask questions on forums, IRC channels, etc.

Paul Graham has more tips: http://paulgraham.com/pfaq.html

[BvS]

Thanks