Currently a senior at a fairly good university studying Sustainability Studies (hybridized major between environmental science/ecology/economics/politics), but enjoy all intellectual topics.

I've taken 'calc 1' equivalent which is fairly hard at my university and managed to pass with a 'C+' - not 100% effort. I have the ability to do the math but am not great at it nor do I particularly enjoy it.

I have just started using codeacademy and am just going through tutorials slowly. I'd love to hear any other good resources or tool for people trying to independently learn to code, or anything I should avoid in general. I feel as if I'm missing out on a very relevant modern tool, and would love to learn if it is do-able.


Any and all direction here is appreciated. Stories, anything!

I've been doing the same for about 3 years.

I dropped out of school in year 9, and i've managed to learn a lot of what I wanted. Education doesn't matter as much as long as you have the motivation and desire to learn.

codeacademy is a awesome resource so you are doing well there, what language are you learning?

Something that helped my process along a HUGE amount and is probably the reason I didn't give up - keep it relevent to something you love doing, i.e games, that sorta thing. I used to read certain game code/apply it to what I was learning at any given time, doing so also helped me understand what was happening more, just make sure it's well written code by someone that knows what they are doing.

No focus yet, I'll probably lean towards apps and webpages as I have ideas in my head but no idea how to actually create them. For now I'm just learning the basics so I can better understand and pick a direction of focus.

Thanks for the suggestion. I may make a blog style post to keep track of progress.


As I was doing the code academy stuff I took notes as I went (very basic topics). Do you think I should just cruise through where I can, or take everything slow and take notes along the way.

Get the fundamentals of programming down. Do NOT speed through this part. Even though it may be boring, make sure you actually understand what they're teaching you or you will regret it.

Thanks for the advice. Just learning the basics of html as of yesterday/today. Took it nice and slow and took decent notes. I figure if I can be consistent 1-2 hours per day for a year I could build a decent base of skills (or so I hope).

i'd recommend longer sessions. 2-4 hours every other day would be more helpful if you can manage it. it's not like vocabulary where small amounts of time but high frequency is the key to success. when you start writing real code, you won't be able to get much in a single hour. you'll need to debug and you'll face problems that you can't solve in an hour.

Good to know, I'll try to budget my time better so I can do that. Thanks

Made my first basic HTML website on one of the tutorials. Successfully linked some stuff and added images ect. Pleb stuff I know but I'm slowly progressing from pleb to complete noob. I'll continue posting as I progress. My notes helped quite a bit. I can tell I'll have to remember quite a number of terms for each 'platform' I learn to code on. I feel like I'll do well giving 1-2 hours a day possibly more on some days for a year straight.

If anyone is decent at coding and wouldn't mind answering basic questions when I run into trouble along the lines that would be great. (just as someone to talk to about coding as I have no friends that code)

This post was edited by Blankey on Jun 26 2013 11:45pm

just post your questions here. there's lots of people willing to help

Now give php a try. PHP is used to create html documents on the fly (this way you can change what is in the html document based on anything you like, a simple example would be a script that creates the page with the background color based on what day of the week it currently is).