In alignment to codegeek's recommendation, and depending on your conditions / preferences: You can also pick up small gig building more (and better) websites f

In alignment to codegeek's recommendation, and depending on your conditions / preferences: You can also pick up small gig building more (and better) websites for local businesses. There's always a dumpy restaurant wanting a new website for few hundred bucks. The time you would spend with a textbook / tutorial, you can also consider synchronously apply them to real life commercial use. Also, you know Java and probably a lot of backend / db stuffs... you can bundle the whole stack together and build business solutions too instead of just "websites". Like a simple restaurant POS UI, sends order to kitchen kind of system... again, depending on how much free time you have and willingness to code for little pay just to learn. JS / Front End Dev is one of the best setup to pair up with small jobs like that IMO. I can also recommend Douglas Crockford's book JavaScript: The Good Parts http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596517748.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596517748.do Disclaimer: Never an academia kind of person, I take forever to go through any book. I found myself learn faster when I can go hands-on and fail within reasonable comforts. Now 15+ years into front end, I consider myself doing quite alright...