What the hell should I try and learn?

#1

Post by saltcod » Tue, Jan 03, 2012, 11:56 PM UTC

"Learn to code" is the new black. But what should one learn?

Javascript? Rails? Djanjo? PHP? ASP? Node? jQuery? Sinatra? iOS? WordPress? Drupal? etc etc etc. (I recognize that some of these are foundations for others).

I freelance using WordPress and have come to know it very well. I'm certainly not a PHP developer, but I'm capable of pulling a nice, functional site together. I know CSS and HTML extremely well, jQuery is coming along. But that's about the extent of it. I can pull together some SQL statements, write enough PHP to string a few things together

So, I end up constantly wondering: where should I spend my time learning to program? Should I just sit down for 6 months in the evenings and learn Rails? Should I focus on Javascript? PHP? iOS?

If you knew HTML/CSS/WordPress today, what do you think would be the best thing to start learning tomorrow?

Re: What the hell should I try and learn?

#2

Post by benologist » Wed, Jan 04, 2012, 12:43 AM UTC

Node's a lot of fun, I've been having a blast with it the last couple weeks.

Re: What the hell should I try and learn?

#3

Post by _sjs » Wed, Jan 04, 2012, 12:51 AM UTC

Look around and test the waters.

Do you want to do frontend or backend stuff? Run through the rails tutorial, and check out django if you want to do web development. See if you enjoy those.

If you want to do backend stuff, run through the node tutorial.

Just do what you enjoy!

Re: What the hell should I try and learn?

#4

Post by saltcod » Wed, Jan 04, 2012, 1:22 AM UTC

_sjs wrote: post #3

Look around and test the waters. Do you want to do frontend or backend stuff? Run through the rails tutorial, and check out django if you want to do web development. See if you enjoy those. If you want to do backend stuff, run through the node tutorial. Just do what you enjoy!

Thanks. Certainly I imagine it would be front-end development.

I just had a moment (or a million moments) this past year where I realized that I'm doing all these freelance, on-off projects for people, I'm definitely not actually learning to code.

I get better at using WordPress, better at debugging for IE, better at CSS3 stuff, I've gotten far, far better at using jQuery, etc, but I'm still not learning to program.

I feel like maybe I should take this whole year and sit and learn Ruby on Rails in the evenings, and then after the year is over, maybe I'll finally have a reasonable handle on OOP, MVC, etc....

Re: What the hell should I try and learn?

#5

Post by saiko-chriskun » Wed, Jan 04, 2012, 6:32 AM UTC

Both Ruby and JavaScript get my vote, in terms of mainstream web frameworks.

For Ruby you obviously have Rails, but there are also some other neat frameworks out there such as http://padrinorb.com

For JavaScript, the various frameworks are obviously built upon node.js, my favorite being http://railwayjs.com