Learning Web Development: where to begin?

[MTT]

If you are set on Web Development take a stab at the online stuff first and see if you can make progress. The sweet spot as I see it is being able to develop or just effectively use Vendor provided API's to to interact with other Data Bases.
If the online stuff is not getting you where you need to be? ITT Tech, Devry ect. I have seen some solid IT guys come from that path.

Now if you are just looking for a new Job and future in the Tech / IT world.

Go learn and get certified as a DBA. Application DBA's are in very high demand.

Data Bases are getting bigger and bigger requiring much more real-time attention. More and more Application or Solution intelligence is being moved into the DB.

Oracle or MSSQL if you know one you will end up being effective in the other.

The HUGE companies I work with are not happy with the offshore model.

Competent DBA's are in high demand and are very well compensated.

You need to know the tools.
Be a bit of an artist (Creative think outside the box)
responsible and disciplined (Proactive)
Open to constant change new stuff all the time learn learn learn.

If this is you? Sign up at a tech school pass the cert, and don't look back

[shroom]

definitely tech cert/school > bachelors

[LegoSkier]

I'll be straight forward with you. Most development is done off shore these days. You might be able to get in on a startup. I'd get into mobile development if it were me. I'm not sure why dude said you shouldnt get into .net or java. You need those skills plus more. The more tools you have skills in, the more valuable you are going to be. You need to hit up community college. You can learn most tools there. Once you get some web skills, you can branch off and teach yourself alot of the other languages. Mobile/tablets are big these days. They have been for quite awhile now. I'd definitely go that route. But you need to learn the basic skills. HTML, XML, JAVA, .NET, PHP, etc. Any larger company has a guru for their line of business and outsources all the coding. You can get gigs at smaller companies like smaller mortgage companies, smaller tech companies, etc. But out in the corporate world, its rough. They are more looking for sharepoint/database skills than just straight web coders.

Not my experience at all but then again all the places I have worked (including at a very large company now) aren't doing public facing apps. All our stuff is developed in-house because off-shore people would never gain the adequate business process knowledge needed to do the development. We tried it, they sucked and we had to scrap everything and start over with in-house developers.
Which brings me to my other point in that another way to go is to learn development but then also to have depth of knowledge in the business processes, economics, science, and technology of a specific industry. Say a becoming quant for financial, or specializing in Biotech IT, or whatever industry. Every industry has specialized IT/developers that not only have development skills but also domain knowledge and that will give you an advantage any day over someone with general knowledge.

[filthyfrenchbum]

Thank you for the valuable information. I'm gonna give this a stab over this summer, and I'm currently starting with Python. Coincidentally, I randomly stumbled upon three articles the last few days stating that coding is the skill that most recent college grads lack and should have...

For others who may be interested, MIT open courseware is great (true college-level, IMO fairly hard intro classes)

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrica...2011/index.htm

Easier (currently completing the Python one as well) is www.learnstreet.com.

Reading a book on Java as well.

Other resources/ideas? I hope that once I get good enough at this (a year or so), if I don't take one of those hot-shot SF classes an internship somewhere seems like it would be a good way to build experience.

Stoked to eventually build little projects, I'm already getting some satisfaction/frustration out of my first 7-line programs!

[Hugh Conway]

Stanford offers online courses for free as well
http://online.stanford.edu/courses

[Poop~Ghost]

Other resources/ideas? I hope that once I get good enough at this (a year or so), if I don't take one of those hot-shot SF classes an internship somewhere seems like it would be a good way to build experience.

I've been in a full time web development guy since '99 and IMO the best thing to happen to development is MVC for asp.net... I've been doing "classic" asp.net development for ages with our own brew of jQuery api backend to MSSQL db. Our shop is starting the jump to MVC4 and it's a huge improvement.

There's basically zero unemployment in my field for guys who know how to code.

http://www.asp.net/get-started

The other way to go (also zero unemployment) is to get into objective c and develop for iPad. My neighbor is an objective c developer and he gets 3-4 calls a week from head hunters trying to get him to jump ship... and his resume isn't posted anywhere.

... The main problem with "what should I learn" is that everybody (for the most part) likes what they do or they'd have jumped to a different thing. So by default everybody sorta ra-ra's for their current skillset. Most important thing is learning how to do this:

Front End -> API Calls -> API Methods -> Database

I don't think I've ever written a bubble sort but I write jQuery api calls everyday.

[akokskis]

I'd put another vote down for Java. If you can learn and understand it well, you should be able to pick up most other languages to a decent level of proficiency within 2 weeks.

Plus, as many others have said, lots of jobs out there in the Java world.

[shroom]

java -> c#

[Poop~Ghost]

<!--java --> c#

Released a fix for you.

[shroom]

heh. i just had a lengthy conversation related to this flying seattle - slc this am. that was the advice given to me by both a younger MS (windows team) and older Phillips developer. it was more in the line of present/future employment, not what is best. ive only barely broken into c, vb.net, and vba, so im not in a position to defend their advice, my schooling was in IS- just passing along.

[corn dog]

As you can see there are a lot of things you can do that have something to do with computers/programming/web dev/cs. This is good, it means if you find something you like and get after it there is a good chance you'll be able to find a nice job doing it
Having a decent comp sci education is a very good thing, if you don't know anything about data structures and algorithms or run-time analysis (Big O/time complexity stuff) it will limit your options. E.g. Google, Amazon, MS all expect you to have that stuff down to a good undergrad/grad level. Anywhere that regards itself as a programmer shop will expect some familiarity with the ideas at least.
I think python is fine to get started on. I'd suggest running with it for a bit until you don't have to think so much about syntax. I'd also suggest learning javascript since that goes hand in with html and css for web development, and its a nice interesting language too.

[The Reverend Floater]

My money is on Java Spring and Responsive Design...or that's where a lot of money is being spent, both domestically and off-shore.