[chrsm]

I hate to be "that guy", I think that taking courses online is a waste of time.

1. What do you want to learn? Web development? Systems programming? Native application programming (whatever the platform)? Figure out what your target is.

2. Go to your local book store after you solve no. 1, pick a book up that involves that general topic, and read a few pages to see if it works for you. Don't buy a "learn x in y hours/days" book. Buy something you can use as a reference.

I've found that it is easier for me to focus and understand things when I am not actually trying to do them at the same time.

3. Specifically about Rails: I'm not hugely qualified to speak about Ruby, but the friends I do have that use Rails daily have always told me that Rails has grown pretty hard for newbies to jump into immediately. Of course, I could be wrong. I wrote a small project using Sinatra, which is a really easy way to jump into using Ruby & writing a web app at the same time.

I wouldn't recommend putting any money into bootcamps. You can teach yourself everything you need to know. The majority of bootcamps I've seen are fairly expensive for someone without any real understanding of what they're getting in to, and I would go as far as to say I have seen 0 that would teach anything useful beyond "learn language x", which you can do on your own - every popular language has excellent documentation. You should want to learn the fundamentals, and try to figure out how to apply that knowledge to any language or situation you come across.

(Hope that helps a bit.)