Identikit
Redneck Pornographer
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I am self a taught developer. My best advice is learn with some goal in mind if you can. Knowing what a language does is one thing, but thinking about how you intend to use it and executing those intentions is a skill within itself that needs to be built upon as you learn to code in my opinion.
What I personally did was I started with the intention of building out a website a month Initially with just JS/HTML/CSS as I learned. I didnt meet my goals at first, and I was lost often. Over time I was lost during less and less of the process.
Then I learned python to do some automation projects for my ecommerce business (tasks like scraping product listings from other sites, or building process's to reorganize/transfer files/folders, automating some of the adwords stuff I was doing) and eventually did some data modeling for adwords.
And the learning journey continues to this day.
While Learn Python the hard way is a decent book ( I went through the entire third edition book back in the day) it honestly didn't really help me as much as automate the boring stuff with python. I think the big reason is because of the author of learn python the hard way kind of has a " my way is the best way" mentality where he wants you to type out every exercise and not skip anything in the book regardless of what your skill level may be. Automate the boring stuff just had a more practical approach that clicked with how I do things.
Another piece of advice is learn to be comfortable with not knowing some things for a while. Some concepts just take time to click, and that time varies from person to person. The more you learn to code, the more you will start to realize there is no way to internalize everything, and that some times the code just does the thing, thats that. This part is probably the biggest challenge for me, and I struggled with it until I got my first job and realized that its likely that all developers end up not knowing some things. And of course I am still learning.
Honestly a Computer Science degree doesn't mean shit other than you ticked the boxes at school when it comes to actually programming. I was hired as a jr dev with two CS grads with no github, or portfolio work done outside of what was required for them to get the degree. I had my own unique portfolio, and a github with a ton of commit history( basically a record of how many times I update my code if you dont know). They both quit, and now I get like 20k more than what they started me at, plus I do work on the side for small business's that is a fairly decent source of income as well, and can only grow as long as I put the effort in.
If you are persistent enough of a learner, you can learn faster on your own with the internet. I'd dedicate like 3+4 hours after my old job to learn, and after about 2-3 months of that I was already trying to devise ways to make money with my skills. One thing I did was just create better websites for smaller business's, get in contact with business owners and try to sell it. I got rejected often initially, but eventually I sold to a few and now they are clients that I serve.
The only reason to get a degree, or be taught in a school is if you are unable to build a learning structure for yourself and you need your hand held through the process, which honestly in the end probably holds you back. Once you get a job, or actually start getting into building projects, you will be googling shit anyways. The beauty of coding, is most the information you need has either been printed in a book, or put on a website somewhere.
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