You can signup for an account on www.hackerrank.com and ease your
way back
into programming.
there's this too
http://mashable.com/2015/01/11/teach-yourself-programming/?
utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link
FWIW, the stats on hackerrank agree with the lead in the mashable story.
People who actually managed to do anything at all are already at the
88th percentile of the hackerrank general leaderboard; and if I
understand the scoring system properly, doing a gimme exercise in
each of the domains would suffice to put one at the 95th percentile
(40th percentile of actives). There's a short tail at the high end
(6% of actives, <1% overall, with 200-100 points), about half the
actives are between 100-50 points, and a long tail dribbling off
towards the great sea of 0's.
There's obviously something about programming that discourages most
people from sticking with it. (on the other hand, most of the coders
I respect for their chops are (a) largely autodidacts, and (b) even
had to learn, at some point in their careers, usually the hard way,
that the solution which doesn't involve any programming at all is
often better in the long run than the immediately seemingly
attractive one which does. (cf "nerd sniping" http://xkcd.com/
356/ ) Leave this sort of person alone with a CDC 3600, and when
you come back it will be dedicating a large number of actuators to
playing "Stars and Stripes Forever" in multipart harmony)
Now, the middle of the mashable story mentions someone who claims his
instruction program runs about 200 hours. This might seem difficult
to reconcile with the order 1'000 hour estimates earlier in the
article, or the 800-1'000 hour commitment of the typical boot camp.
However, a quick visit to the site reveals the slogan "Learn HTML CSS
iPhone apps & more" (sorry for the shop talk; if I need to be
explicit: at most one of these three things involves any
programming), along with full-screen pictures of people who give one
the strong impression that they are consumers, not developers.
This is why it is good to know what one's goals are. Apparently
industrial webdev is teachable in a few hundred hours, but on average
one must budget about 4-5 times more for actual programming (again,
entry-level industrial).
Your mileage will almost certainly vary, and I'd like to believe that
at a hobby level, programming can be accessible and enjoyable without
the commitment, at something closer to 50-100 hours/year. But I have
to admit that success on this level seems much more likely among
people who have the resources to teach themselves than among the
target audience for formal curricula.
-Dave
for a different, more visual, take on what I'm trying to say,
juxtapose these two images:
http://wac.A8B5.edgecastcdn.net/80A8B5/static-assets/assets/new-
marketing/ipad-img-c88a73377fbf541da42829f5e247ec13.jpg
http://rack.0.mshcdn.com/media/
ZgkyMDE1LzAxLzEyL2U2L1Byb2dyYW1taW5nLmU4MGExLmpwZwpwCXRodW1iCTk1MHg1MzQj
CmUJanBn/1948c996/b7d/Programming.jpg
with this one:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/ce/9c/21/
ce9c21e22b37c8677f77fcdb0d819a41.jpg
