I recently decided to re-learn programming. Because I already know HTML and CSS the web is a fast prototyping environment for me, so JavaScript is the logical language for me to learn. Besides,
- JavaScript has stood the test of time and the community has improved it a lot
- It’s now on the backend too
- There’s a ton of new/cool learning resources
- jQuery
At first I tried learning from a traditional book, from CodeAcademy, and by reading online. But I was only spending 30 minutes a day on it, and nothing stuck. It’s like my guitar teacher told me when I was 14: “When you start, you need to practice at least an hour a day to train your brain to think this way, or it’s not going to work.”
Four days ago I bought the excellent Head First JavaScript Programming book and have been making my way through a chapter a day, obediantly doing all the exercises with a pencil in the book and in code on the computer.
It feels great. My brain is so happy to learn something new and useful. After day 2 I was able to bang out a simple prototype of an algorithm that was too painful to do in Excel. I wish I had done this sooner.