| I am in the process of doing exactly this. If your ventures are web apps, my recommendation would be to learn Ruby on Rails. You will be able to build demo apps within a few months of 8-10 hours per week. I started with RailsTutorial.org, which is a free book that will take you from installing Ruby to building a twitter clone. From there, get a few books, I recommend Agile development with rails and The Rails 3 Way, and continue to work on some smaller apps. There are also great screencasts you can find by searching for "railscasts." If you are using windows computers, install Ubuntu Linux which is really easy with Wubi. I have found it makes things easier. If you have a mac, stick with it. For text editor, I use Sublime Text 2, and if you're on mac, just go with Textmate. Sign up for Github and learn about version control. Also, go through projects on Github and learn by reading other people's code. After you have a semi-grasp of the basics, start building something substantial. Search Stack Overflow when you have questions, and if you've been trying to figure something out for over six hours, ask a question on Stack Overflow. For html and css questions, I generally just google any issues I have and fool around in firebug, which is a firefox extension that lets you edit html or css and see the changes on your screen. Best of luck! |