I would recommend to get both microsoft certification on HTML5+Javascript and Oracle certification for JavaSE7 associate programmer (entry levels). That way yo

I would recommend to get both microsoft certification on HTML5+Javascript and Oracle certification for JavaSE7 associate programmer (entry levels). That way you can show you have adequate skills. Then you need to build an app (maybe build something that actually has value and see how it goes reallly) and if it doesn't go very well, post it on github to make people see the quality of your code. I suspect if you want to do this so fast you would need to breath in code for some months, I think it's more realistic to spend sometime getting the general idea and studying up a bit about what are databases,types, programming languages, operating systems and then choose 2-3 specific things and study them out a lot. Some things: Java Javascript/HTML5/CSS combo MySQL Mongo this covers a wide range of possible jobs. Good luck. P.S I took the same path as you do now, and I found myself finishing distance-learning university @ 34y. I don't regret it though.