First of all, practice makes perfect, throw yourself in to a project, even if the task seems childish and inane, get yourself in to the routine of regularly chu

First of all, practice makes perfect, throw yourself in to a project, even if the task seems childish and inane, get yourself in to the routine of regularly churning out code and you will become a much better developer. One thing you will find is time pressure, as you go forward you will want to give up or spend more time with your family, make sure you devote some time to them as well, an unhappy coder generally makes for unproductive sessions. Once you are in to the swing of things, coding away big chunks every day, you will find that the standard functions given to you no longer suffice, try to write a small library to ease whichever issue you are having (but please, don't bother us with it if it's yet another javascript library!) and you will begin to understand modularity and namespacing. One key thing is this: if you have the passion, no matter your situation you will become a much better programmer, if you don't care or don't devote time to the task you will wilt. There may be those who claim that they learned python in 6 weeks, or became a coding superman guru in 12, but this is a game of masters and those stuck behind them, it's a long journey ahead of you and a few years before you can really say you are competent but if you stick at it like the rest of us, get involved with the community and do your part, you will inevitably, through trial and strength of will, be where you want to be. If you are stuck for a project, try implementing a simple text based game in PHP, then try to convert some of the code to c and port it to the software level, it will teach you a lot about the differences between programming languages and when to use one over the other. P.S. Wrote this comment for your deleted topic :)