My learning path has gone through several steps over the last couple of yours. I started out in a study group, 2 hours every Thursday evening, learning python with others without any experience. That turned into a lot of YouTube tutorials, beginning to read documentation and programming blogs. Parallel to this I began studying computer science in the evenings and during lunchbreak, mainly learning from CS50 on YouTube and reading Charles Petzolds book “Code”.
Today I’m following Codecademy’s back-end engineer path. I really like this structured way of learning, knowing that someone with more insight than me put this together into a box of related and relevant topics to learn. This way of learning of course is more expensive than learning through various free resources such as YouTube and books (from the library), but I move forwards so much more quickly now.
I’m glad that I’ve spent some time on the computer science topics though. Not that I am challenged on various sorting algorithms and the like during courses on JavaScript, DOM-manipulation and API-calls, but it gives a foundation that at least gives me some confidence in way I think about projects. Actually knowing a bit about time-complexity, pointers and tree structures is an interesting lens on the project, specifically when it comes to optimizations, and something I actually already used to improve a budget app I build last year. Also, this gives you something to discuss with developers who studied computer science when you yourself went the self-taught way.
How do you learn? And what is important in a learning resource in order for you to consider paying for it?
Development of a developer 