[OGiR]

As a CS student entering into my second year and feeling a little drained from studying theory, this summer I spent a lot of my time learning practical skills and technologies and coding for fun.

I've been learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, PHP, Apache, MySQL, Bash, Ruby, and Android. I've also been using Linux regularly for the first time, as well as Vim.

The main projects I have been working on are my personal website/blog, a text-adventure game in Ruby, A js game using Canvas, and working through the chapters and exercises of "Beginning Android 4 Application Development" (feels like a tome).

[atmosx]

Sorry but having a hard time mastering only 3 of the words that you've put together here (being already familiar with Linux and vim), how exactly do you "learn" JQuery, PHP, Ruby and Android in 3 months?!??!?!?!

I'm asking out of real curiosity, I'm not judging or anything.

[OGiR]

Well, for JQuery I have been reading tutorials on W3schools and practicing with toy web pages and using some for my personal website. For Ruby, I have been reading the pragmatic programmers book, as well as documentation, and I was playing around with the language by writing a text-based RPG. For PHP I needed to learn some basics to get my wordpress site online, but I also have been reading a book on the LAMP stack, and the w3schools tutorials are very helpful. For Android, I am already familiar with Java, so I have been reading the book I mentioned, as well as the documentation, and working through the practice exercises, as well as tinkering with them.

I don't work on these all at the same time, but since I am out of school for 4 months in the summer I have had a lot of time to spend a couple weeks working on one project, and then a couple working on another, and so on. I don't have a schedule for myself, but I try to do some programming every day. There are a lot of technologies I would like to learn; I have a whole career in the future to specialize and learn something VERY in depth.

Also, I'm a quick learner ;)

EDIT: Forgot to add Git to the list in the first post. Something else I started using this summer.

[mcintyre1994]

I hate to discourage someone whose obviously a really practical learner but just a note that last I checked a fair amount of w3schools things on particularly php were a bit dodgy around security and dealing with now deprecated things.

Php has says to make things really insecure and unlike your book on Ruby which probably shows you the right way to do things there, w3schools doesn't tend to. It's not a huge deal while learning if you're a quick learner and don't get bad habits but it's worth being aware of and looking into if anything gets serious.

If you want a really over the top look at why some people don't recommend w3schools, check out w3fools.com

If you're looking for a solid php resource with a more modern and secure approach I'd recommend http://www.phptherightway.com

Overall it's probably just worth noting that wherever w3schools recommends something you wouldn't do in Ruby it's not because you should do that in PHP - and it'd be worth looking in your php book or other resources for the right approach in PHP.

[OGiR]

Thanks for the words of caution mcintyre. I am pretty new to all this, and my approach for learning outside of school is to just build things, and figure out the bits I don't know along the way. So when I need a quick reference to something, the w3schools tutorials are always a quick easy way to look at code snippets.

I have been spending a lot of time lately studying outside of school, but it can be difficult to know what to read, what to code, what to learn. So I appreciate the feedback from knowledgeable people very much.

I have seen that the pragmatic programmers write very good books that have great reviews so I will stick with them for sure. I will look a bit more critically at w3schools, though, and I will definitely check out the php site you recommended.

I would love to hear more advice from people in the industry on what I should be learning and how I should be learning. If you have any ideas about how I should work on more practical things outside of school to give me real world skills I would be grateful for an email: [e-mail]

[atmosx]

You are a quick learner :-) ... Nice!