I am 35+. Never coded myself except for small feats in HTML/CSS. Background - corporate finance.
It's difficult to learn from scratch, but it is not that difficult.
If your goal is web development, then I would point several key things that worked for me:
1. Don't be afraid to start and try it out.
2. Knowledge builds by iterations.
3. If you stumble - make a break, then get back to the stumbling block. Most of the times it will be solved fast.
4. Keep your end in mind.
5. Do some practical project, that has value for you.
About me:
- punched with HTML/CSS; hand programmed simple static site;
- got aquainted with Drupal; digged into Drupal; installed on hosting, installed and played with some modules, played with changing themes;
- started Django - Django book, tutorials, various books - stumbled;
- read through Learning Python by Mark Lutz, did exercieses - stumbled after 60-70% [decorators, etc];
- returned to Django, continued with books & simple projects - needed to get static assets working -> had to install webserver, did not want Apache, so I tried nginx - stumbled;
- got VPS from Linode - but needed to know a bit CLI and Ubuntu nix, since server is headless; stubmled - went through CLI tutorials;
- at the same time when installing web server stumbled with DNS, had no clue how it works, stubled - so digged through wiki, blogs, etc to understand the basics;
- with CLI and DNS basics under my belt, started setting up VPS - some packages in Ubuntu repositories were old and security risk - installed from PPA, but had to compile nginx, postgres, some other packages;
- installed!;
- in one week the whole set up was hacked;
- went through too many tutorials on nix hardening; iptables; auditing tools ; honeypots; logging local and remote; server monitoring [Graphyte and friends]; rootkit detectors, etc
- now back to Django...
In the background I digged a little bit into - databases [postgres, mongo, redis]; js [charts, various other libs]; some Python libs [requests, Pygments, etc]; OLAP/BI and host of other things.
That is a short summary w/o too many details.
It is a lot of fun - don't limit yourself. Your fears are your first enemy. So just do it.
It's difficult to learn from scratch, but it is not that difficult.
If your goal is web development, then I would point several key things that worked for me:
1. Don't be afraid to start and try it out.
2. Knowledge builds by iterations.
3. If you stumble - make a break, then get back to the stumbling block. Most of the times it will be solved fast.
4. Keep your end in mind.
5. Do some practical project, that has value for you.
About me:
- punched with HTML/CSS; hand programmed simple static site;
- got aquainted with Drupal; digged into Drupal; installed on hosting, installed and played with some modules, played with changing themes;
- started Django - Django book, tutorials, various books - stumbled;
- read through Learning Python by Mark Lutz, did exercieses - stumbled after 60-70% [decorators, etc];
- returned to Django, continued with books & simple projects - needed to get static assets working -> had to install webserver, did not want Apache, so I tried nginx - stumbled;
- got VPS from Linode - but needed to know a bit CLI and Ubuntu nix, since server is headless; stubmled - went through CLI tutorials;
- at the same time when installing web server stumbled with DNS, had no clue how it works, stubled - so digged through wiki, blogs, etc to understand the basics;
- with CLI and DNS basics under my belt, started setting up VPS - some packages in Ubuntu repositories were old and security risk - installed from PPA, but had to compile nginx, postgres, some other packages;
- installed!;
- in one week the whole set up was hacked;
- went through too many tutorials on nix hardening; iptables; auditing tools ; honeypots; logging local and remote; server monitoring [Graphyte and friends]; rootkit detectors, etc
- now back to Django...
In the background I digged a little bit into - databases [postgres, mongo, redis]; js [charts, various other libs]; some Python libs [requests, Pygments, etc]; OLAP/BI and host of other things.
That is a short summary w/o too many details.
It is a lot of fun - don't limit yourself. Your fears are your first enemy. So just do it.