Disclaimer: I'm going to be as honest as possible. I went to MakerSquare in Austin, TX and while it was one of the best decisions for me I can see how it is no

Disclaimer: I'm going to be as honest as possible. I went to MakerSquare in Austin, TX and while it was one of the best decisions for me I can see how it is not for everyone. I got the incredible chance to work at MKS as a fellow after my program was done, so I got a behind the scenes look at how it all comes together. Although they (and most schools) do a lot of vetting to find the truly driven individuals who are perfect for this format of learning, it is certainly an imperfect science and inevitably some people attend who would have been better off going it alone. My advice is to start small, go to the free lessons on codeacademy, codeschool or treehouse and learn enough to build a simple front-end app (such as a number guessing game or a comment system). After that you should have a better idea as to if you want to plunk down the chunk of change to take it to the next step and attend one of these programs. Although a lot of programs market themselves as career changing opportunities I would advise you to not pay this much money on your education just for a better job (some see it as a purely financial investment with their future salaries being the return.) The reason I say this is because even though you might make more money, and even if you are good at programming that doesn't necessarily mean you will love doing it day in and day out. And that has more impact on you being a consistently great developer than most would think. All in all This is an investment in your future self, and as such you have to ask yourself if you really want to be in front of a computer half slinging half slogging code every single day for it to pay off.