Hello all. I’m an IT guy. I understand hardware, networks, telephony, etc. But I’m not an expert on any of them, meaning, I can work and understand any of the technologies at different levels of complexity, but I’m not an expert on them, and in general I find them boring.
What I really like, is software developing, which I started with logo at the age of 6, then moved to QBasic, Turbo Pascal, Delphi, and Lotus Notes, while in the middle learning whatever language was required by my university: a little bit of C, Visual FoxPro, Cobol, Assembler, Visual Basic and Java. I even tried learning HTML/CSS but never got to finish.
Now, because of a series of misfortunes and/or miss decisions, I ended up truly “mastering” two platforms that never really catched on, or at least not as much as I like: Delphi and Lotus Domino. Also, because of the same series of misfortunes and/or miss decisions, I never got to work on a developers group within the companies I worked at, so all my experience is from working alone, and more or less self-taught.
So now I’m at my 40s, and I want to have my skills updated as fast as possible, so that I can become a better developer, so that I can one day be developer’s manager/lead, or a more interesting developer, so that I can get a more senior job.
So what courses/lessons/books should I take to be a better developer? What courses/lessons/books should I take to know best developing practices? What courses/lessons/books should I take to be a “developer’s manager/lead”? What else should I learn to be a better developer in general?
If you were in my position, what other options would you consider? (I tried PM and didn’t like it by the way).
Also, I’m not from USA, as you can tell by my writing, so anything where I need to be there to take a class is normally a no.
Sorry for the long post, but I’m really lost and want to be a better me to provide for my family!
THANKS A LOT!
Another reason to go with Android is that you'll be learning a platform that has a pretty interesting future. It seems like some peripherals that might really take off (like the Oculus Rift, Google Glasses, or some TV software) will be using the Android platform, giving you an increased opportunity to get on board something big on the ground floor.
Android has the added benefit of being very well documented, fairly easy to learn, and great free resources that Google gives out, because they want the platform to succeed.
If you truly are decent at development I'd give the plan about 6 months of serious work to start paying off.