Ask HN: Best and Fastest Way to Learn Modern Languages?

[ckpwong]

I've slaved my way through most of the past decade working with some dead-end proprietary technology, managing to ignore the rest of the software development world while unlearning most things I learned for/from my computer science degree.

Now I want to find a better (work) life, yet found myself woefully unskilled in the languages, libraries, platforms, and paradigms that are much more employable.

I dabbled with some of them (Android, Python, RoR) but still feel incompetent to apply for a cool job -- I can't truthfully tell any employer I am immediately useful upon hiring me.

What are some of the best resources for learning a programming language along with its paradigms quickly?

[yk]

In my experience, the most useful thing to learn anything are projects. So you should pick something, for Android, Python, RoR perhaps a stupid fantasy football game ( or some unified HN and reddit aggregator) and solve the problems that pop up while building it. This has two benefits, first you learn about the type of problems that are actually important and second you can truthfully tell a future employer: "I can build stuff like this." and let them decide if they hire you.

(This is likely not the answer you were looking for, but the only skill that you can learn just by reading is reading.)