Hi, I've been doing research on a career in coding/programming and now I'm very interested and motivated to learn it. I'm a complete beginner and limited financially at present. So I'm confused as to how to go about it. I love reading a lot and sitting on my laptop, so no problem with studying. I'm the type of person that likes to learn an important big wide subject in stages. To first get a decent background and understanding of it. Then to go deeper into it. Is the following way a good way to go about it?

Go through books such as Sams teach yourself Html, CSS and JavaScript, then some frameworks such as Bootstrap and jQuery. Then make 2 or 3 projects for my GitHub Portfolio. This will be the Front End as far as I know. Then I do similar with the Back End by learning SQL, Python, and as a framework, DJANGO. Then do 2 or 3 more projects for my GitHub Portfolio. Then learn the remaining critical issues such as the latest Security features and Authentication features and e-commerce features. Then do 1 or 2 final projects. I could also learn about WordPress. I think this whole study needs more than 600 hours. But it's worth it as it will open the doors to many good stable jobs, freelance work and also Smartphone App developing.

After this I can go to some short in-class intensive courses, if need be to round up my skills. Or maybe keeping regular contact with forums will give me enough assistance.

I would greatly appreciate your sincere advice.

LearnTheNew commented: Python is the most widely used high –level programming used for general programming purpose only. This programming language was basically created by G +0

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The only way to learn programming is by doing it. There are a lot of books out there that claim to teach you X language in Y days. No book can do that. All a book like that can do is teach you the syntax. Language consists of syntax, grammer and idioms. There are design techniques that are common to most languages. Learning how to use every tool in a carpentry workshop will not teach you how to design and build a house so read books on software design. Practice makes perfect, but also, malpractice makes malperfect.

I agree with Jim. Hands-on learning is the best way by far.

If you're just getting started I'd recommend CodeAcademy.

Finally, in the UK is national coding week this week, there are free courses up and down the country. I'm mentoring at Full Stack Of Pancakes in Manchester.

Often understanding why something is done a certain way can often help.

Set yourself a project goal, make it something you don't currenly know how to do. It's okay to google your way through it but just remember when you copy/paste code from forums etc. try understand what the code is doing. Look up the functions and what they do.

W3Schools is great at explaining it in great detail with examples you can mess with to help get your head around things.

Learn from each project you build and improve on it, you will only get better as a result.

Alway remain inquisitive

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