Solvent comments on [link] Guide on How to Learn Programming - Less Wrong

6 Post author: peter_hurford 18 April 2014 05:08PM

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Comment author: John_Maxwell_IV 18 April 2014 05:58:45PM *  3 points [-]

This guide looks decent to me. I've heard that programming bootcamps like AppAcademy, etc. are already doing a lot to increase the number of entry-level Rails developers in the market. I haven't really heard of any non-web-development focused bootcamps, though. So it might not be a bad idea to focus on building skills in mobile development (supposedly iOS is really hot right now), data science, computer security, etc. instead of Rails and JavaScript. For someone taking this route, I would recommend Learn Python the Hard Way to gain a foundation in programming (Ruby tends to be used for web development only; Python is used for all sorts of stuff) and then choose a specialty and focus on it.

Edit: this guide seems to confirm my intuition that most bootcamps are web-focused. Additionally, I would argue that the web application programming model is a fairly inelegant one and might be a relatively bad place to start learning programming conceptually. Here is a salary guide for various computer programming specialties; you can also do searches like this. By the way, I've heard that White Hat Security is a good place to get an entry-level application security job, even if you don't have any programming experience.

Comment author: Solvent 23 April 2014 12:52:33AM *  2 points [-]

Zipfian Academy is a bootcamp for data science, but it's the only non web dev bootcamp I know about.