(As a precursor i'm by no means a programming authority, there are many people on this forum better than me, but I do hang out with my dev company a lot and they are some of the most brilliant programmers i've ever been around)


Once you get to a point outside of formally learning some theory elements there is no 'next best step'. A lot of it comes down to measures of efficiency and structuring it so that it scales well, but it's more about taking an interesting problem and trying to solve it. For you and what I know about you and what you'd be most likely to do, i'd learn some python/ruby and try to build an application that interacts with an sql (or postgres) that is much much larger than your dealing with currently, and try to keep doing it doing things quickly/efficiently.

A lot of this will do with how you build out your DB, consider which redundancies you need and don't need, for instance don't make your tables too large, or interconnected in too many ways, when you query for something you should be able to pull only what you need, especially if it's something that gets pulled very frequently, having bloated tables will hurt you a lot there. Learn how to JOIN! left and right joining will own your life , do them correctly and save yourself a lot of time.

So yea, it's hard to say exactly what you should be doing, but just think about structure/scale/efficiency, and try to go for something bigger than what you've been doing. For the stuff that you do I would def. say you want to improve your DB proficiency.

Anyways, just my 2c, hopefully someone else will have a better answer for you

Disagree with this. It depends on how much time you have available, but it's not like being a pro sports player or something where it's impossible to do it unless you start young.

I am not the world's greatest programmer, but you don't need to be, especially to start your career. I didn't own or use a computer until my first year of college, I never took any advanced math in high school, nothing like that. When I was like 24 I had an idea for a website and I went and bought 3 or 4 books on programming, studied them very hard for a few months and made the site I wanted, and it was very successful. I am not the world's greatest programmer at ALL, but I can still make anything I want, and have done tons of varied projects, from huge websites to desktop apps to iPhone apps.

There are thousands of guys much, much more into programming than me (I don't consider myself a programmer really these days, more of an overall product guy), and they would program me under the table, and those are the guys who get the jobs at the hot startups and the big name/big brain web properties and whatnot, but there is tons of work for people who aren't in the top 20% but can put together a website. And if you just want to program a web project for yourself, most of them do not need a HUGE amount of hardcore programming skills.

There was an article maybe 6-12 months ago about how many professional programmers can't do this really simple program... god, I forget what it is, I think I'm getting it mixed up with some other simple program from a Google recruitment article. Oh yeah, ok here it is, FizzBuzz:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/200...s-program.html

ANYHOW, my point just being: Don't worry if you didn't start programming young.

I guess I somehow didn't see a bunch of replies in here before I posted that, but anyway, I don't know if anyone covered the age thing much.

I think there are general thinking skills/logic stuff that is much more important than pure hours as far as becoming a good programmer. There are probably lots of 25 year olds who will kind of suck at programming no matter how many courses they take, but lots of 25 year olds can do fine.

Like anything, it has to do with passion and really delving into the subject. If you're someone who got into poker fully, read everything you could about it, watched a million vids, read a million pages of 2p2, and thought about it hard, you should do fine if you do the same stuff with programming. Anyone who made decent money at poker (as I assume most ppl in BFI have) probably has the perseverance, work ethic and intellectual ability to become a decent programmer.

I'm at the beginning of learning to program but I tend to agree with you. Even if the goal is to get a job as a programmer I think what you said probably applies. It's simple supply and demand. I read recently that there are two programming openings for each qualified candidate. Tons of companies need programmers and there are only so many Stanford CS graduates to go around.

At teamtreehouse during the signup process they have a box to check if you want to be considered for jobs at Facebook, Living Social and others who are looking to hire people who have certain treehouse badges. That makes perfect sense and I would imagine is an end goal of CodeYear. Depending where it goes I could see companies recruiting and interviewing people (and hiring some) simply based on the fact that they have completed all 52 lessons.

Just saw this on Hacker News, thought some people might be interested:

http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/computin...d-course.shtml

Carnegie Mellon started an iPad app dev course and they are giving it away free on iTunes.

However:

"object-oriented programming experience is recommended."

Nice link, thanks. Did see it says:

"The software engineering topics taught will focus on the latest technologies available in the newly released iOS 5."

But if it's too advanced, there are already that course on iTunes U from Stanford that is really great, it's an entire run-through for beginners to iOs programming

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/drupal/

I don't think it's possible for anyone to be able to code in javascript, ruby, python, and not be able to figure out HTML/CSS. You might not be able to use it like a professional, but you'll be able to use it and understand it (or at least be capable of it).

Are there any good free tutorial sites that will teach me how to build database driven sites?

I'm not too keep on these javascript, CSS, HTML newage "schools and classes".

dc,

The PHP classes here probably have a lot of that:

http://p2pu.org/en/groups/

Neal Sales-Griffin of Code Academy - TWiST #230


Interview starts @ 10:00
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LK6lKCKMQM

Jesus let the guy speak!

heh... wrong code academy :-p, or different one at least ;p

Lol so brutal, they even put codecadey.com in the overlay and the guy commented "I can't believe you just did that..." I have codecademy.com out ranking codeacademy.org for "code academy" in Google too .

yea haha, def. painful for that guy ;p and i'd imagine codeacademy.com at this point to be crushing it, it's gotten so much publicity / linking i'm sure .org (esp @ 6k / course, which may be good value, but v free and viral) prolly has no chance :-p

late to the party, but just signed up