Clint Of All Trades

There is a lot of great advice out there on how to switch careers into software engineering, but sometimes you just want to know exactly what someone learned to switch their career. This article is about that - the resources I used in switching careers including: online readings, books, tutorials, courses, bootcamps, etc. Keep in mind that when learning from, say, a book, I can't readily capture the google searches I inevitably made for personal learnings along the way. I highly recommend you conduct plenty of supplemental searches to clarity "fuzzy" points in your learnings. The following learning resources are in  chronological order of the order I learned them . I have also provided a rating from 1-5 based on how valuable each learning was to me  at the time I learned it (ie: in context of the learnings I had already done prior). Think Python - How To Think Like A Computer Scientist  ★★★★★ This is the start-from-scratch CS training book I needed, but di...

Are free coding tutorials worth your time? I regularly get this question from people who complete a few of the free online coding training courses. People don’t feel there is anything they can really “do” with their learnings from these tutorials. The tutorials are "too focused. Too abstract. So, what are online tutorials good for? Should you do them? If so, what value will you get? Free training courses are available through sites like  CodeAcademy ,  CodeSchool , etc. These courses often focus on language-level syntax. Languages & topics like:  Ruby ,  Java ,  Python ,  JavaScript ,  HTML ,  CSS , RegularExpressions, etc. At the end, you may even get a CERTIFICATE!  (note the overemphasis)  In this post, I’ll be sharing some insights on when and how to use these courses. One Thing At A Time "Will these free courses help me build real programs?" Yes and No. Let me explain.  Courses like CodeAcademy, CodeSchool, ev...