Step one, do everything you can, all the reading all the turorials, build all the things. Keep in mind what makes you a good programmer is (1) patience, (2) passion. Yeah probably not what you were expecting to say. One of your challenges is going to be how frequently you're going to struggle solving problems, it's tempting to blame the computer, the software, the predecessor, but 99% of the time it's you. You'll learn patience with yourself and patience with your machine. What's on your side are your passions, building things, solving these technical puzzles, each of these creates a little bit of a high, pair that with something you care about and you'll be hooked, forever.
If you want to succeed, I've found the following things to be helpful in accelerating the learning process:
- Find a partner. This person should be about the same ability level as yourself.
- Be consistent. Set aside time, even just a few hours one night a week to meet with said partner and work through problems together. This tends to work especially well if say you decided to build a website / web app together and work on that in your few hours per week together and between meetings assign yourselves the tutorials and readings to complete.
- Blog. This part for me was the most challenging, it was required for the RailsGirls Summer of Code program I volunteered with, and it turned out to be one of the best resources I had. I don't mean write essays and poetry consider it more of a log, a post everyday that you're working on coding about what you read, what you did, what commands you're learning. Trust me, you'll be reading this over and over as you can't quite remember what command you used last week to do something but you don't have the vocab to find it on google yet...
- Build Community. I've found the best thing out of all of this is a small group of smart, bike riding, badass women I met a Rails Girls programming workshop in spring of 2013. It's crazy to think how many of the 40 women that were there that day I now consider close friends. Rails Girls is a set of DIY workshop materials for hosting a workshop in your community. I highly recommend looking into hosting one where you live -- or finding who already is/has.
###Study Materials I'm organizing these in a recommended progression, feel free to jump around do what ever you like, there's no right or wrong answer. If I've recommended reading something you think is over you head, maybe just skim it for now. Sometimes I'll recommend you read something you've already read a few weeks prior, do it, you'll get a whole new prosective with a tiny bit more experience.
Free Online Tutorials
- Rails Girls App Tutorial
- Learn Ruby the Hard Way
- CodeKatas
- RubyMonk
- RailsCasts
- TryRuby
- Micheal Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial
- Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby
- RubyKoans
- Free Code Camp Haven't used this before -- interesting idea, they teach you to code in exchange for volunteering to help nonprofits with your skills.
- Javascript for Cats
- Learn You a Haskell for Great Good
- The New Boston's YouTube Videos
- GitHub's Online Training Courses
- Learn to Build on AWS
Books
Paid Online Tutorials
- Treehouse
- Codeschool
- Upcase - Built by Thoughtbot
Resources I haven't yet used:
Noteworthy Coding Bootcamps / Dev Schools
- Recurse Center - Previously Hacker School. Best of the best imo. Free tuition, competitive application process, NYC.
- MakerSquare - Scholarship's for Women in the LA office
- Turing School - Nonprofit, Colorado
- Ada Developer's Academy - Focus on women + diversity, Seattle.
Other Coding Bootcamps / Dev Schools
- Hackership - Berlin based, low(er) cost, maybe not for profit?
Apprenticeship Programs
- Thoughtbot's Appretice.io Rockstar web consultancy pumping out open source software and tools for other programmers to become better programmers.
- 8thlight Apprenticeship
- Pivotal Labs Apprenticeship - Not listed on web anymore?
Resourse Lists from Others