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That's actually really good advice. Agree completely that finding a good canonical source that takes away all possible ways to get derailed is awesome. The onl

That's actually really good advice. Agree completely that finding a good canonical source that takes away all possible ways to get derailed is awesome. The only thing I'd say is that I do think web dev is still the best thing to learn first when getting intro programming for two reasons: There's something about having what you've made out on the internet for anyone to see, that has a URL attached to it that is much more rewarding that writing something that lives purely in your own computer. The second reason I think webdev is very good is because there's a huge job market out there for it for which the barrier to entry is fairly low. I think it'd be very hard to get a job as a backend engineer with 0 experience being self taught, vs starting out in front-end web-dev (not that one is harder than the other!).

sAuronas 10y ago
I agree with much of what you said. I self-taugh that way (Codecademy). I teach my nieces this way. However, If I had it to do again I would have started with iOS - my current profession - or Android, simply because the IDE is more defined. Web technology is all over the place. Unless you wrote vanilla JS, you could spend more time fretting over if AngularJS is the way to go if XYZ is better... Sure it was difficult to go from JS to C/Objective-C but if I had considered that from the start I wouldn't have lost the first three months confused about differences between Ruby/Python and JS.
- gb19 10y ago
  I've started the same path & after being confused about webdev flavor-of-the-month technology to learn for a few months, I'm trying to settle on learning iOS/Swift, fundamentals, data structures & algorithms. At least with with iOS(or Android), there is a goal of making an App & submitting it to a store. I still have doubts & keep distracting myself by going back to look at webdev/JS tutorials/books/videos because it seems like there is more webdev jobs available & I'm not sure how to go from webdev tutorials/self learning to an actual job. I already know HTML/CSS & have made static sites for small businesses in the past.

sAuronas 10y ago

I agree with much of what you said. I self-taugh that way (Codecademy). I teach my nieces this way. However, If I had it to do again I would have started with iOS - my current profession - or Android, simply because the IDE is more defined. Web technology is all over the place. Unless you wrote vanilla JS, you could spend more time fretting over if AngularJS is the way to go if XYZ is better... Sure it was difficult to go from JS to C/Objective-C but if I had considered that from the start I wouldn't have lost the first three months confused about differences between Ruby/Python and JS.

gb19 10y ago
I've started the same path & after being confused about webdev flavor-of-the-month technology to learn for a few months, I'm trying to settle on learning iOS/Swift, fundamentals, data structures & algorithms. At least with with iOS(or Android), there is a goal of making an App & submitting it to a store. I still have doubts & keep distracting myself by going back to look at webdev/JS tutorials/books/videos because it seems like there is more webdev jobs available & I'm not sure how to go from webdev tutorials/self learning to an actual job. I already know HTML/CSS & have made static sites for small businesses in the past.