

Ask HN: How can I get up to speed? - RyanHolliday

Basically, when I was a teenager I taught myself HTML/CSS, did some low-quality podcasting and blogging with friends, read tech and startup news constantly and did some freelance web design. Then, I went to college across the country, lost touch with my tech friends, studied political science and then business administration, and I've been completely out of the loop letting what limited skills I do have get rusty. So, what is your advice for me (and for anyone else in a similar position, who either has no tech skills or who has rusty, very rudimentary ones) to get up to speed?<p>Super broad question, so any kind of feedback is welcome. Programming languages to learn, a book to read, a blog I should have in my reader, anything.
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davidw
Ruby (on Rails) or Python (Django) would be a good place to dig in, to start
doing web stuff. Those languages are also applicable to non-web problems as
well.

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codeslush
If you're going down the rails path, start with this free and great intro
tutorial/book: <http://railstutorial.org/chapters/>

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RyanHolliday
Thanks! This looks great, really comprehensive.

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codeslush
It should be noted that it not only gets you going with Rails, but also
instills some great practices __from the beginning __\- like test driven
development. Get started and you'll have your own little twitter deployed in
just a couple of days! ;-)

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jpmc
What do you want to do with this knowledge? We could recommend ten types of
hammers when what you need is a screwdriver.

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RyanHolliday
Good point. Initially, what I'm looking to do is to learn enough to put
together, at least in a rudimentary fashion, the ideas that I have for apps or
startups. Right now I'm one of those people with ideas and no ability to
execute, and I realize how pretty much useless that is.

