Based on my own self-taught path, I think it's a lot easier if you have a project in mind first. Many moons ago, I had a few personal web design clients (fronte

Based on my own self-taught path, I think it's a lot easier if you have a project in mind first. Many moons ago, I had a few personal web design clients (frontend developer wasn't a term yet), and I was tired of updating their static sites by hand. So, I decided to learn PHP (and MySQL and Apache) in my spare time to solve this issue. That took a long time. A year maybe? Certainly not 40 days. Then, I got interested in the Arduino, then graphics programming (openFrameworks, openGL), then iOS apps, and the list goes on. I worked as a graphic designer during the day, and would tinker with this stuff at night or the weekend. Eventually, started applying to developer jobs, and the rest is history. The point is: My interest in writing software was primarily hobby driven. Not career driven. I would run into a problem with the code (or some concept), research it, and move on. The projects I worked on would dictate the path in which I learned these things. All that said, I would have loved something more structured. Beating your head against the wall to figure things out isn't the most time efficient way to learn things. But, it's the way I did. And, fwiw, this field is a constantly moving target. You're going to have to teach yourself a lot over the years.