| Coming from someone who had no formal "schooling" in CS and really not a clue where to start, my biggest piece of advice is: Literally read everything you can get your hands on. When you come across something you don't understand, look it up, because 9/10 times it leads you to something better than where you started. I would now consider myself a fairly experienced amateur, although it took me much longer than expected to get up to speed. It took me a long time to get on the right track, if you will, and by that I mean getting a base understanding of programming in general and then on top of that, figuring out what exactly I should be learning and in what order to eventually pursue a career in Web-based Development/Engineering. I had no one close to me in the space that I could get advice from either. So I really am a raw use case. That being said, I think what would have helped me the most is finding a resource that addressed all of my short comings: - If I want a job, what is hot in the industry, where is it trending? (Answer: JS and Mobile) - If I am interested in pursuing X, what is the first language I should take a look at, or at least some framework buzzwords (i.e. Web: Rails is/was hot, APIs are driving the future, JS is very hot. So, Ruby, JS, maybe Python). - Where should I look for go to resources / where can I ask questions (SO, HN, etc.) The biggest problem I ran into is that even after I slowing found the answers to these questions, I still didn't know how to get started other than buying a book. However, I found that the majority of books don't "tell a story" and the majority of online resources (blogs, etc.) are not geared towards absolute beginners. I not only needed to understand the basic such as syntax, but I needed to understand how things fit together at a high level and the best way I found of doing so, was having a resource walk me through the baby steps of building a real-world application, from start to finish, tying in the larger picture as the end of each chapter. I mean, you have to understand that someone who is brand new doesn't even know how the backend and frontend relate to each other. Basically, for beginners, even those resources that are "targeted" at beginners, assume too much. I guess that is something to chew on, but what it comes down to is that I wish I had a resource that told the high level picture better and guided me in the right direction from day 1, as far as "Where do I start if I want to learn web development, and why I am starting there?" And give me a few good resources to get me going. |