Coming from someone who had no formal "schooling" in CS and really not a clue where to start, my biggest piece of advice is:<p>Literally read everything you can get your hands on. When you come across something you don't understand, look it up, because 9/10 times it leads you to something better than where you started.<p>I would now consider myself a fairly experienced amateur, although it took me much longer than expected to get up to speed. It took me a long time to get on the right track, if you will, and by that I mean getting a base understanding of programming in general and then on top of that, figuring out what exactly I should be learning and in what order to eventually pursue a career in Web-based Development/Engineering.<p>I had no one close to me in the space that I could get advice from either. So I really am a raw use case.<p>That being said, I think what would have helped me the most is finding a resource that addressed all of my short comings:<p>- If I want a job, what is hot in the industry, where is it trending? (Answer: JS and Mobile)<p>- If I am interested in pursuing X, what is the first language I should take a look at, or at least some framework buzzwords (i.e. Web: Rails is/was hot, APIs are driving the future, JS is very hot. So, Ruby, JS, maybe Python).<p>- Where should I look for go to resources / where can I ask questions (SO, HN, etc.)<p>The biggest problem I ran into is that even after I slowing found the answers to these questions, I still didn't know how to get started other than buying a book. However, I found that the majority of books don't "tell a story" and the majority of online resources (blogs, etc.) are not geared towards absolute beginners.<p>I not only needed to understand the basic such as syntax, but I needed to understand how things fit together at a high level and the best way I found of doing so, was having a resource walk me through the baby steps of building a real-world application, from start to finish, tying in the larger picture as the end of each chapter.<p>I mean, you have to understand that someone who is brand new doesn't even know how the backend and frontend relate to each other.<p>Basically, for beginners, even those resources that are "targeted" at beginners, assume too much.<p>I guess that is something to chew on, but what it comes down to is that I wish I had a resource that told the high level picture better and guided me in the right direction from day 1, as far as "Where do I start if I want to learn web development, and why I am starting there?" And give me a few good resources to get me going.