My background is a BS in EE from 2008 which involved only a couple programming courses -- intro to CS and image processing. I'm comfortable with how programs generally work and the logic behind them, but wouldn't be able to create an app from scratch for the life of me.

I'm extremely interested in being able to build web apps. Partially motivated by the "coolness" of creating things and partially because I have been on the frustrated end of the client-developer relationship a couple times now.

So I'm thinking about doing a few things:

Books
Learn to Program (read this last month)
Agile Web Development with Rails

MS
I want to do a part time MS and likely will do it in EE while taking a few CS electives like Machine Learning. Would doing this in CS be that great for coding (seems like a lot of it is technical stuff that doesn't matter that much)? Doing it in CS would probably require me to take a bunch of supplementary courses prior to starting since I wasn't a CS undergrad major, so I'm kind of trying to avoid that unless it'd be considered very useful.

Coaching/Building
I've got a few really small and one medium web app that I'd like to make so how about getting a coach to help me along with the process, but doing much of the development on my own? Then eventually moving into creating them entirely on my own or with just a little assistance.

Internships
I think that coaching/building is probably much superior and more likely to happen than an internship since I doubt many companies would want my rusty/shaky CS skills at this point.

Thoughts?

Both ends are often extremely frustrating imo.

The only thing worse than being a client and dealing with a ****ty developer is being a developer and dealing with ****ty clients.

Yeah a masters in CS would help you a ton. Most jobs in software programming require a cs-related degree even though a lot of it isn't really helpful day-to-day. It's not the only way to get in though. Obv you need to learn to program first. Build some small stuff on your own. Make some contribs or start an open source project. Get an internship. Do hackathons (charity, university, corporate, etc.). Make connections (linkedin). gl

A couple of clients ago I spent 30 minutes on a conference call talking about their feelings. Not kidding. *sigh*

If you want to learn to do web development quickly, imo, your two best options for language/framework is Ruby/Rails or Python/Django. As I went through this process last year learning Ruby on Rails, here are some of the sites I found most useful- I would recommend going through them in this order as well:

1. Ruby on Rails Tutorial-
http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-o...-tutorial-book

2. Rails for Zombies-
http://railsforzombies.com/

3. Rails Official Site Guide
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/

Those 3 sites will give you a great foundation for writing web apps in Ruby on Rails. You won't know how to do everything, but you should know enough to figure out the rest. Once you get through those, then start going through the resources on these sites to fill in the gaps:

railscasts.com, peepcode.com, codeschool.com, railsapi.com

i would vote ruby or java. also here's my favorite ruby guide. the authors are quite respected:

http://www.rubycentral.com/pickaxe/

Java? I don't think that's a good choice. PHP would be a much better option.