Hello, I've recently turned 17 and have a strong passion for coding.

Due to my FAFSA being late I won't be able to attend college, so I've decided to dedicate myself for the next year to learning code (:

I've recently started the Code Academy program to learn the basics, and am half way completed with it. Everything comes to me quite naturally.

However...

I'm curious as to what I can do (once I've completed the program) to further my education in coding...

I do plan on attending college next year, but I have a strong drive further my education NOW.

And from what I've seen this subforum has no hesitation to help those who share the same passion, which is why I'm here.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, If only you knew.


Thanks ~
Steven

This post was edited by Exceptions on Aug 31 2013 04:05am

What do you intend to do with your knowledge? Are you a hobbyist? Any interest in breaking things? Do you want to do full on programming, or more of simple scripting?

If you want to work in IT infrastructure, I'd say to learn things like BASH, Powershell, and autoit scripting, and maybe some python and perl. I use all of these daily (especially powershell) for automating servside tasks and network monitoring. I'm not very good with any of these, but I'm good enough to save myself a lot of time.

If your interests lie in web things, look into PHP, html5, javacript, and java. We've got a few Java apps at work that needed some love, so I've given mysef an introduction to java so I can help make them a little better.
Honestly, once you get the concepts of one language, all the others come pretty easily.

You should check out udacity, udemy, MIT's open courseware, coursera, and edx. Google them and get ready to learn.

This. You should know what kind of projects you want to be involved with and at which layer.

If you're interest in develloping power applications with high performance, tight ressource management or online networking, you should get experience with threaded devellopement (locks, atomics and ressource sharing) and crypto.

I'm still trying to decide between a Software engineer, or a web developer.


@Qord - Are these on two different sides of the spectrum? Or do you still believe that once I've understood one language the rest will be much quicker to learn?

@Flyinggoat - Those things would fall under the category of Software engineer, correct?


Thanks a ton, both of you!

It's definitaly more related to Software engineering, but timing and threading issues might be relevant to a web develloper in a big scale project with concurent database access. Crypto matters to web dev as well so I'd say they're generally useful topics to have experience with as a developer in general.

What Qord meant was that once you master program flow and computer logic with a given language, those parts remain the same thourough otherl languages.

At the most basic level, they are all very similar. If you know what a loop is in C, then you know what it is in VB. The only difference is the terminology (verbage of the programming language) used to make the program do what you want. I think the most important part is understanding the concepts behind creating programs.

Traditionally, software engineers did all the heavy lifting, wrote the actual programs that got stuff done, and web developers made web sites. The programmers made large things, and the web guys made smaller ones. Nowadays, with the rise of mobile computing and Android/iOS, you tend to see a lot of what used to be web developers turning into "app" creators, sort of bridging the gap between web developer and software engineer.

I think that what it really comes down to is simply: Would you prefer to make and maintain massive programs and application, or would you prefer to create web apps, design web sites, and create other web content? Of course, there's nothing that says you can't do/learn both. The concepts remain the same, so why not?

Do you plan on going to a non-profit school?

That makes a lot of sense.

I more I think about it making and maintaining the programs and applications, rather than making websites is much more down my alley.

^ ^ ^ ^ ^ If this what I decide to do, which languages would I primarily be using?

Also for schooling I would be getting a transfer degree from a community college. So 2 years there, then transfer to a 4 year college.

coursera.org - free college-level courses! If you apply yourself, these can really help you in the future

Going into my second year of programming through a college course (Never touched any code prior, just did computer teching/building), I suggest you start by learning the broad basics of programming. For example, what is data? What is a data type? What are functions? And the list goes on and on and on. The language the college I attend chose to teach us all of this was C++, though you can easily use Java, Python, etc. (I personally prefer C++ )

Once you're confident you understand the basics of what code is, you can start diving deeper into your language of choice, or if you're feeling up for it, switch it up completely! You'll notice something quickly in that there's a strong chance both languages will look similar (Assuming it's C-based)! Start researching things like structured programming, OOP, networking, the list goes on here as well.

If you're still reading and the above two tasks have been taken care of, I'd test my knowledge by doing a project of personal interest (I'm sure you have one of those if you're getting into programming!). You'll learn important skills here like being a good code ninja (searching for bits of code fast on google and transforming them to your needs) and troubleshooting. You'll also get to mess with different IDEs, my personal favorite for all things C++ is Visual Studio, and Netbeans for Java (I don't like Java ). Notepad++ is GREAT for coding stuff like HTML, CSS, PHP, etc as it recognizes file extensions!

Overall, I don't think there's a single path to follow towards becoming a successful programmer/developer. There's just too many things to know, and the field advances much too fast for any knowledge to be considered stable (just a generalization here for everyone else who'd raise a tone to my comment ). Go out and learn what interests YOU most first. If you want to make money after, go find out what people want NOW, and learn it NOW. Best of luck in your studies and feel free to pm away any questions you may have