It's a little like the Matrix. You can't always just be told what it is. You have to be shown.

In my experience the points at which I've learned the most have come when I've been working with like-minded people that I can bounce thoughts and ideas off of and more experienced engineers that you can learn from regularly. Being able to ask lots of questions is important - you can watch an entire tutorial series but if there's something you don't get early on then it's going to be a struggle.

Writhyn wrote:

I like your spirit, and I'm basically doing just that with my music endeavors, but with computer stuff I personally need general knowledge first.

Did you start your music adventure by learning music theory?

With software development, it's really best to have some training to help you get going. StackOverflow-ing your way through a project is not going to teach you all you need to know. It's one thing to be able to piece together a simple webpage, but when things start to get more complex, you need to be familiar with proper design principles or you'll be banging your head as you copy, paste, and reorganize ad nauseum. It's also important to have some understanding of what's going on under the hood, even though web development is such a high-level abstraction.

Googling around will teach you how to write a "for" loop, but not how to approach a complicated project.

For the record, use StackOverflow on an almost daily basis.

I like your spirit, and I'm basically doing just that with my music endeavors, but with computer stuff I personally need general knowledge first.

Did you start your music adventure by learning music theory?

Seriously. Forget courses, forget all those 'learn to make an app in 30 steps' sites. Just pick a project, start coding and google everything until you run out of internet.

Coming up with, and implementing efficient algorithms

YOUR MOTHER COMES UP WITH, AND IMPLEMENTS EFFICIENT ALGORITHMS!

This is a bunch of math problems, generally increasing in difficulty. Every problem can be solved by brute force, but the goal is to write a piece of code which gets the answer in under a minute. It's not a course, but I've found it really fucking helpful for

• Thinking like a programmer

• Thinking about data structures

• Problem-solving

• Making use of common coding structures (loops and conditionals and boolean logic etc)

• Coming up with, and implementing efficient algorithms

• etc

Can't recommend this enough!

For general programming, I'd recommend the "Foundations of Programming: Fundamentals" course; especially since the language used is Javascript, which is the most commonly used programming language in web development. It's taught by Simon Allardice, who is an absolute force when it comes to online teaching. I've personally learned a lot from his courses.

I'm not a web developer, but the "Web Design Fundamentals" course seems like a good place to start for a general overview of the subject.

Creds: Software Developer, B.S. in Computer Science