Building things. Above all, it is the best way to learn. Plenty of sites/resources offer you canned exercises that help you gain familiarity with some concepts,

Building things. Above all, it is the best way to learn. Plenty of sites/resources offer you canned exercises that help you gain familiarity with some concepts, syntax, etc. But nothing beats taking an idea you can express and grasp in human terms and turning it into a program. Here are some starter ideas I give just about every new/aspiring dev I work with because just about everyone knows how they work since they were kids (well, at least in the US): - Tic Tac Toe - Rock Paper Scissors - memory/matching game You can easily ratchet up the complexity once you have these working. Tic Tac Toe can be turned into Connect Four, for example. Similarly, you can increase the complexity of a memory/matching game by increasing the board size, or use what you learn there to create a rudimentary game of Go Fish. There are some more typical types of things to build that feel less playful, of course. Build a to-do app. Or a blog. Or a simple chat/messaging program. Don't over complicate it. Keep it as simple as you can to learn what matters here—CRUD operations with a database, client-server interaction, templating, MVC, and so on.