| In other news, programming is CHALLENGING. Not everyone can learn it and building something that is useful requires skill and experience. Doesn't matter the language, toolkit or number of tutorials at hand - building software is a difficult profession. You can't learn how to practice law or be a doctor by spending a month reading tutorials - why would anyone expect this to be the case in software development? My path to web development was as follows: learn how to think properly (BA History) ;) -> learn software development basics (2 year certificate in Software development, primarilly Java) -> First job maintaining Basic (BBx) code for application built in 80's -> contractor working with prior built custom PHP code -> Full time developer working with Symfony, Drupal and now Rails. Not to mention all the basic sys admin knowledge I've picked up (apache, zeus, perl, shell scripting, networking, etc...) If I had walked into Rails right off the bat, I would have had no idea what was going on. Having a solid understanding of Java servlets, MVC in general and 4 years of prior programming experience meant I picked Rails up rather quickly. Rails isn't my barrier, it's ruby, and syntax isn't' much a barrier for a good programmer. One thing I wish I had was a better background in Computer Science or Computer Engineering. The actual physical reality of how computers work often baffles me and having knowledge of how a CPU works at a base level would definitely make me better at my job. As would a real knowledge of algorithm design. |