Subtract 6 years, and I'm in almost your exact shoes. I'm a professionally trained musician and music teacher, and while I love those activities and would never

Subtract 6 years, and I'm in almost your exact shoes. I'm a professionally trained musician and music teacher, and while I love those activities and would never want to stop doing them, I always wanted to expand my abilities to include software design as well (plus, regular and/or better pay is always a wonderful perk). So I'm in the middle of doing what so many on here already suggested: 1)MOOCS (Coursera, edx) 2)Crowdsourced resources (wikibooks) 3)Free/freemium online books (http://programming-motherfucker.com/ http://programming-motherfucker.com/) 4)Many open-source communities (git-hub, stackexchange) As far as the learning is concerned, constantly switching between different sources above to hear the same information from different resources and taught in different styles is crucial I think. I know this from my formal teaching background and feel comfortable with the learning part of this entire venture. The second part of your questions though about finding work I'm not so sure about as I'm not there yet. I personally have chosen python as my language to learn because I've found that: 1)It makes sense to me after trying out a couple of different languages on codeacademy 2)The clean syntax and forced indenting structure allows me to focus more on the problem domain then the language itself (or which indenting/bracket style to use). This can be said of any language I'm sure as people have different preferences and perspectives, but this was clearly evident to me early on. 3)With the discovery of Django and so many other python based tools, I realized that I could actually achieve a lot by specializing in python. But of course I need to include html, css, and perhaps random java script as well to get a dynamic web page going, but at least Django frees me from needing to get into php. 4)I personally have a creative mind and less of an engineering mind. Learning C or some other lower level language would drive me nuts I think AS A FIRST LANGUAGE. I'm able to casually learn about different algorithms and data structures in python without having to fully master them just to make a basic program (as I would in C for example). Now my goals might be different from you, I have a long list of projects and ideas that I would like to do on my own that could possibly make money, so I'm making all my decisions from a passion perspective, not as a supply/demand one. But maybe that's not quite a bad idea after all? You're already starting from scratch, why not try your own projects first doing them in exactly the languages you want to do them in? I've always felt that there are always plenty of people doing the "standard learning" track for the "standard jobs" that the market demands. If your trying to follow a market, you'll always be at the whim of the market. Why not make your own market? I always come back to this quote: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” ― Howard Thurman