

What the hell should I try and learn?  - saltcod

"Learn to code" is the new black. But what should one learn?<p>Javascript? Rails? Djanjo? PHP? ASP? Node? jQuery? Sinatra? iOS? WordPress? Drupal?  etc etc etc. (I recognize that some of these are foundations for others).<p>I freelance using WordPress and have come to know it very well. I'm certainly not a PHP developer, but I'm capable of pulling a nice, functional site together. I know CSS and HTML extremely well, jQuery is coming along. But that's about the extent of it. I can pull together some SQL statements, write enough PHP to string a few things together<p>So, I end up constantly wondering:  where should I spend my time learning to program? Should I just sit down for 6 months in the evenings and learn Rails? Should I focus on Javascript? PHP? iOS?<p>If you knew HTML/CSS/WordPress today, what do you think would be the best thing to start learning tomorrow?
======
saiko-chriskun
Both Ruby and JavaScript get my vote, in terms of mainstream web frameworks.

For Ruby you obviously have Rails, but there are also some other neat
frameworks out there such as <http://padrinorb.com>

For JavaScript, the various frameworks are obviously built upon node.js, my
favorite being <http://railwayjs.com>

------
_sjs
Look around and test the waters.

Do you want to do frontend or backend stuff? Run through the rails tutorial,
and check out django if you want to do web development. See if you enjoy
those.

If you want to do backend stuff, run through the node tutorial.

Just do what you enjoy!

~~~
saltcod
Thanks. Certainly I imagine it would be front-end development.

I just had a moment (or a million moments) this past year where I realized
that I'm doing all these freelance, on-off projects for people, I'm definitely
not actually learning to code.

I get better at using WordPress, better at debugging for IE, better at CSS3
stuff, I've gotten far, far better at using jQuery, etc, but I'm still not
learning to program.

I feel like maybe I should take this whole year and sit and learn Ruby on
Rails in the evenings, and then after the year is over, maybe I'll finally
have a reasonable handle on OOP, MVC, etc....

------
benologist
Node's a lot of fun, I've been having a blast with it the last couple weeks.

