Ask HN: How can I get up to speed? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can I get up to speed?

5 pointsRyanHolliday10 comments

Basically, when I was a teenager I taught myself HTML/CSS, did some low-quality podcasting and blogging with friends, read tech and startup news constantly and did some freelance web design. Then, I went to college across the country, lost touch with my tech friends, studied political science and then business administration, and I've been completely out of the loop letting what limited skills I do have get rusty. So, what is your advice for me (and for anyone else in a similar position, who either has no tech skills or who has rusty, very rudimentary ones) to get up to speed?

Super broad question, so any kind of feedback is welcome. Programming languages to learn, a book to read, a blog I should have in my reader, anything.

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Ruby (on Rails) or Python (Django) would be a good place to dig in, to start doing web stuff. Those languages are also applicable to non-web problems as well.

Of the two, does it matter which one I start with, or are both equally suitable for an absolute beginner?

It does not matter. Both are suitable for beginners and have widespread support within the programming community. I can add "php" to the list, which also falls on the same level in terms of resources available on the net.

I agree with this especially if you're trying to get jobs.

You will inevitably have to learn some javascript at some point though so you might also want to look at node.js (awesome but not as many jobs yet).

If you're going down the rails path, start with this free and great intro tutorial/book: http://railstutorial.org/chapters/

Thanks! This looks great, really comprehensive.

It should be noted that it not only gets you going with Rails, but also instills some great practices from the beginning - like test driven development. Get started and you'll have your own little twitter deployed in just a couple of days! ;-)

Agreed. These are good places to start because you can just start building and learn as you go. Once you start building, you'll figure out what you need to be reading very quickly.

What do you want to do with this knowledge? We could recommend ten types of hammers when what you need is a screwdriver.

Good point. Initially, what I'm looking to do is to learn enough to put together, at least in a rudimentary fashion, the ideas that I have for apps or startups. Right now I'm one of those people with ideas and no ability to execute, and I realize how pretty much useless that is.

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