doesnt really matter where you go, just go somewhere. Also doesnt matter what language you pick, just pick one and start learning. So many good resources out there you cant really go wrong, and I think people new who want to learn waste waaaaaaay to much time and energy worrying about which language to learn or what site to use to learn.

I started with python and learned it form the MIT open coursware fwiw

Such a good site so far really like how organised it is, I haven't got too far with it yet but it seems really good and quite easy to understand.

There's blogs that give advice on how to reorganize the modules, in case you find yourself a little lost, but if it's working for you, stick with it.

Haha this so much. Describes me perfectly except I'm hodge podge learning stuff and not just focusing on a language and doing nitty/gritty projects.

I wasn't getting anywhere trying to learn ten languages at once. Got too burnt out doing intro stuff over and over and over. Focusing one one or two languages has helped me be able to achieve projects that I find interesting and push myself further.

To each their own.

Yea luckily not trying to do that yet. Focused a lot on C and some parts of its derivatives.

A lot of what I've been learning is about general comp Sci stuff but if I don't start putting code down I'll never be able to do anything cool

Where would you go to hire someone to build a site for you? Maybe someone is looking for a project on here?

There's sites where you can list projects and potential pay, I don't remember any names but I'm sure someone here will. Most common issue we see around, I think, is people having no clue what to price their project at and severely low balling the price.

Off that topic, if you're doing complicated programs or sections of code, does anyone ever find it useful to draw out the problem? Was working on a doubly-linked circular list and could not figure out the logic, but as soon as I sketched out three cases it made perfect sense what I needed to do. Standard?

agreed with that, I think the problem I have though is that I don't really understand what I want. I mean I could show someone what I want but I just can't explain in word format.

I'm fairly certain that studies have shown that engaging parts of your brain that deal with spatial reasoning has net benefit for memory and problem solving so yes I would say it's a good thing.

Also I believe someone recently asked this question and the overwhelming response was that sometimes people sketch out or write down difficult problems for clarity.

I have a 13"x15" white board on a hook next to my desk that I use constantly. I got it because I was tired of going through so much paper, so yeah at least for me, writing and drawing stuff out is standard

That is a simple and easy idea. So good.

It seems like a lot of the posters here are in some capacity working as web developers. I've noticed a lot of the kids in my classes starting to get web dev jobs. Perhaps this is location dependent, but is it typically easier to get a job fresh out of school in web dev than, say, enterprise programming?

Related: for those working in web dev, how often if at all are you working directly with css/html? Is that mostly done thru automated tools? For front end developers, same question, but with javascript added on.

Thanks as always for all the great responses. This forum is really such a great resource for easing the stress of transitioning careers.

Can't speak to the US job market.

For css/html, it depends on the job. Sometimes you'll pick up an existing template or use a framework like Bootstrap (which then entails learning yet another system...). As a non design oriented person, I'd say figuring out how to lay out a page is a lot more annoying than actually doing it, so if you have an in-house designer to mock things it makes it a lot easier. There's no avoiding the fact that you'll have to write css/html though.

Don't get part 2 of that question. I guess Rails and whatnot qualifies as front-end, but for the most part these days front-end means writing almost exclusively JavaScript, probably backed by some framework or other.

I have to say that as a static-typing guy from way back, having written Angular for a while and then going back and writing C#/ASP.NET MVC, static typing felt a bit like being straightjacketed. I think JavaScript is a pretty fun language to write in, once you have your head around its quirks.

I think I'm mostly curious how much professional developers use programs like dreamweaver or frameworks to handle the meat and potatoes stuff

Here's one guy's critique of Odin that I found illuminating.

Personally, I thought the Intro + Web Dev 101 dragged on way longer than necessary, since they re-go over all that stuff later.

I kinda ****ed off doing Odin for about 8 months because I was tired of learning a new thing one day, then not using it for a while because I was learning some other new thing the next day. Maybe that's my fault for consuming the subject matter in one or two sittings.

By the time I got around to needing the thing I had first learned, I'd all but forgotten it from not having learned it very well or absorbed it during my first learning session.

ymmv of course, but I feel like there has to be a more optimal structure on a per-user basis. What works for me might be a terrible structure for you.

Qualitative judgement on my part, there seeming are an endless number of Web dev jobs in the Puget Sound area. It makes sense. to me anyway, as opposed to enterprise type dev jobs

Another factor is that there are more options to work as web dev in part-time during your studies than enterprisey stuff. At least that used to be the case when I was studying. The enterprise companies' percentage of student part-timers on staff was considerably small compared to the web dev shops'.

So, coming out of school, students are likely to have more applicable experience in the web dev domain than enterprise software. Which in turn makes them easier to hire in that domain again.

I worked as web dev during my studies, however, a lot of it was on the backend side of things (payments processing, plenty of data structure work as well). And when I landed my first programmer job after uni, it happened to be with a company that offers enterprisish software packages, but many of the principles they used were a large part of my master's work as well as closely correlated to the practices I employed in my backend work, so I did extremely well on their entry tests.

Had I not landed that one position out of the gates, my programming career trajectory may well have led to web development.
To put that in numbers, I did apply for and was interviewed for 5 positions in the time after uni. 4 out of those were web dev shops. I just happened to land the enterprise one.

Just drove myself crazy for an hour debugging a small Ruby program using a 2D array to calculate the size of connected nodes, so to speak.

Long story short question, which direction does Ruby evaluate if statesments with an OR in it, and does Ruby short circuit the check?

So:
if x == true || y == true

Which is evaluated first, and if one is true, does the other get skipped?

They are evaluated in order (left to right), and the second one isn't evaluated if the first one is true.

Short-circuit evaluation

if it matters, then you probably need to rewrite your code

Not knowing a thing about ruby, I still disagree with that as a general statement.
Pretty standard thing to do in C/C++ land.
For example, in C++ checking if a pointer to an instance is not null then checking a member variable or method return value.

Can you give an example?

In C#, something like if(myVar != null && myVar.Foo != 'bar') ....

Its standard to do that and completely fine. What is really bad is relying on non short circuit evaluation.

It feels like a side effect and that it would break some principles of clear and readable code (surprise something something), but I haven't programmed in C/C++/C# for a long time so wtf do I know.

I prefer early exit:

To use your example, look at something like this:

Sure, you could split that up into 4 lines instead of two to remove relying on eval order, but seems bloaty for a pretty simple check.
So, if the exit/continuation would look the same, it is fine to rely on evaluation order.