OGiR

Glad to see this being said.

This last year I got fed up with mindlessly completing homework and studying for Math and CS in school and started doing what I really want to do in my spare time; building. I decided web development seemed cool and I used to enjoy making silly little web pages a couple decades ago. It seemed natural to me to familiarize myself with html first, so I wrote a page with just html. The next thing for my spare time was a little site using just html and css so I practice and familiarize myself with some css. Then I started playing with js.

I did encounter the types of situations the article is describing constantly, but I was sure of what I was doing and what I wanted to do so I did not let them affect me. I was going to go whatever slow, awkward route toward web development I wanted to take. I knew I could pick up a framework to code an app, but for my own sake, I wanted to write the whole thing in php, including coding basic CRUD functions for my mysql server and basically reinventing MVC for my own project.

Nowadays I am playing with backbone consuming api calls from my restful django server, and it is wonderful and very exciting, but I had to get there on my own terms, and I am glad I did.

My advice to noobs like me is to play with what you understand, and enjoy the journey, without worry about 'doing things right'.

Yes and yes. I am not a fan of "self-help" books, though this book could or could not be labeled as such. As someone who has for most of my life been quite socially inept, have found it very useful.

After reading this book, I try to make every conversation I have into a little game, where the goal is to get the other person to talk more, and about themselves, than I do. I tend to love to talk about myself, and think almost everything I say is very important.

you can find other forums to ask more "abstract" questions

Could you name a few? I am often looking for places to ask unspecific questions of experienced programmers.

Chef

Thanks for the advice. It is important not to overlook the downsides of any investment strategy, and I do keep very diligent records.

The downside to DRiPs as you mentioned is the amount of paperwork you have to do and the difficulty in selling. For me, however, I am willing to incur that cost for the upsides which are particularly maximized by my personal situation.

I am not sure about how difficult US taxes are, but in Canada they are fairly straightforward for someone adept at math and logic.

I personally own (not through a broker) shares in a diversified portfolio of companies, all of which offer Dividend Reinvestment Plans with optional cash purchases of additional shares directly through the company's transfer agent. This means that I pay no fees when purchasing additional shares for my DRiPs, in fact, a lot of the companies I invest in offer discounts on shares purchased through their Share Purchase Plan. I mostly invest in large companies that pay reasonable dividends with long histories of stability and dividend payments/increases. My goal is to almost never stop buying, making use of dollar cost averaging, and earn a safe return that ought to still beat the market in order to save for retirement/other future investments.

Thanks for the words of caution mcintyre. I am pretty new to all this, and my approach for learning outside of school is to just build things, and figure out the bits I don't know along the way. So when I need a quick reference to something, the w3schools tutorials are always a quick easy way to look at code snippets.

I have been spending a lot of time lately studying outside of school, but it can be difficult to know what to read, what to code, what to learn. So I appreciate the feedback from knowledgeable people very much.

I have seen that the pragmatic programmers write very good books that have great reviews so I will stick with them for sure. I will look a bit more critically at w3schools, though, and I will definitely check out the php site you recommended.

I would love to hear more advice from people in the industry on what I should be learning and how I should be learning. If you have any ideas about how I should work on more practical things outside of school to give me real world skills I would be grateful for an email: bcgir87@gmail.com

Well, for JQuery I have been reading tutorials on W3schools and practicing with toy web pages and using some for my personal website. For Ruby, I have been reading the pragmatic programmers book, as well as documentation, and I was playing around with the language by writing a text-based RPG. For PHP I needed to learn some basics to get my wordpress site online, but I also have been reading a book on the LAMP stack, and the w3schools tutorials are very helpful. For Android, I am already familiar with Java, so I have been reading the book I mentioned, as well as the documentation, and working through the practice exercises, as well as tinkering with them.

I don't work on these all at the same time, but since I am out of school for 4 months in the summer I have had a lot of time to spend a couple weeks working on one project, and then a couple working on another, and so on. I don't have a schedule for myself, but I try to do some programming every day. There are a lot of technologies I would like to learn; I have a whole career in the future to specialize and learn something VERY in depth.

Also, I'm a quick learner ;)

EDIT: Forgot to add Git to the list in the first post. Something else I started using this summer.

As a CS student entering into my second year and feeling a little drained from studying theory, this summer I spent a lot of my time learning practical skills and technologies and coding for fun.

I've been learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, PHP, Apache, MySQL, Bash, Ruby, and Android. I've also been using Linux regularly for the first time, as well as Vim.

The main projects I have been working on are my personal website/blog, a text-adventure game in Ruby, A js game using Canvas, and working through the chapters and exercises of "Beginning Android 4 Application Development" (feels like a tome).