Programming. A subject near and dear to me. It's been a touch and go for me ever since my first programming class back in my junior year of high school (1999-2000 for those keeping count). I've always had a love/hate relationship with the ones and zeros. Mostly because of my overactive personality, programming couldn't hold my attention longer than the two seconds it did when I saw my handy work in action. I've more recently been able to get over this, but sometimes it comes back. Kind of like a manic depressive person.
I've most recently gotten back into programming in the last year after I went to a job recruiter who told me that I needed to add some basic programming skills to my resume. The websites they recommended I had never heard of, but boy, I sure have never forgotten, Codecademy and Git. Well, to be honest, I had heard of Git before but I had never used it.
Codecademy is quite literally, the best programming training website I've ever come across. It does a really good job rivaling W3schools for teaching the languages most used for web development and web app development. The most popular programming languages are on there, like Python, Ruby, CSS, HTML, and javascript. Even PHP is on there, which really surprises me, because it wasn't there when I first signed up. A couple other training courses that they offer are what I'm looking at right now, which is Jquery and an advanced website building course.
The other program I was told to learn was Git. Git is a program available on Linux, Windows and Mac used for backing up programs you are working on and version control(ie. if you make a mistake, you can go back to a previous version of your program that was working the way you wanted it to.) There are a couple of websites associated with Git on the internet that are really useful if you are programming in multiple places, like at home, at work or at school. The ones that are wideley used in the industry is Github. My personal choice is Bitbucket. You can have your programs completely private at Bitbucket, but not at Github unless you buy a subscription. I would use Bitbucket for development, but move it to Github if you need to show it off.
The only piece of advice I can give from going through this situation is to get Vmware player and make an Ubuntu Linux virtual machine, and make a backup of it after you do your first update. Then use a new copy of it to test out the different programs for programming, there are different frameworks, which I will get into another day, and different types of webservers and programs to run your website. if you make a mistake, shutdown the virtual machine, and then copy your backup and you have a new clean version to start over from scratch.
Below are some links to the websites I talked about earlier. Hope I could inspire somebody else.
http://www.codecademy.com/
http://www.w3schools.com/
https://github.com/
https://bitbucket.org/
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