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angersock

http://learncodethehardway.org/

http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html

There. That should do it--for our part, we'll try to be friendly. What more do you want?

EDIT:

http://railsgirls.com/ is actually pretty great to be fair.

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I decided that I wanted a new career in programming. I learned Rails through Michael Hartl's (wonderful) tutorial. Several months later, I had a job as a programmer. My being female has never, ever come up. In fact, of the five programmers in my shop, two are female.

Any interested party can learn the skills, and then all you have to do is find someone you can help. There's a huge demand for programming skills, but a lot of potential clients/employers don't necessarily know what value we can bring. You also need to be somewhat of a salesman.

(Full disclosure: I did come from a programming background, but I was self-taught. My previous job was in an unrelated field.)

Next step (providing you haven't already done so!) is to spread the good word and help train the next generation. :)

Not to discredit your success, but your example is an anecdote, and it is not the usual one. Only about 10% of people in the computing industry are women. See my recent comment here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879195

Honestly, trying to be "friendly" isn't enough. I know nobody told you that it's your job to include others different than yourself, but personally, I feel it's a moral obligation, one that in the end increases productive output of the whole group.

I'll take a guess here and say that it's easier for a white males to find those resources you posted above. More whites have computers. Males are encouraged to explore more-so than women. I could go on and on.. it's not enough to just post something online and assume anyone with the gusto and the self-will can find it. We don't live in a utopia, less than 35% of the worlds population are active internet users.

"easier for white males to find those resources you posted above"

Yes, the Google really cares what sex, gender, or race I am when I enter "learn programming". </sarcasm>

There is a good point that you have to have access to machines in order to program them--then again, we'll ignore that most real computer science didn't have those machines when it was being developed. Even at that point, though, we need to be arguing "Hey, economic status should not be a barrier to entry for programming!" instead of "Hey, why don't you (male, white) folks open the clubhouse to everyone??"

There are enough traditional interests trying to bring those bigoted politics into our field that I'd rather we just focus on embracing and educating everyone, and let the inclusion issues sort themselves out.

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