Reddit reviews A Software Engineer Learns HTML5, JavaScript and jQuery

I got A Software Engineer Learns HTML5, JavaScript and jQuery recently and recommend it for learning that stuff. Because it assumes you are already used to programming, it's relatively short for covering a lot about front-end web development.

> Do you have any book recommendations that don't treat me like I'm new to programming? http://www.amazon.com/Software-Engineer-Learns-JavaScript-jQuery/dp/1493692615 Looks interesting. But the vast majority of material moves far too slow for my taste. I haven't done a lot of web development, so something that shows me how all the pieces fit together quick would be great.

Unfortunately, not really. Most of the programming experience came from 'I need to accomplish X, how do I do that?' types of scenarios. Honestly I learned more from The Pragmatic Programmer and various discrete math books than any technology-focused book (though Learning Python has been pretty invaluable).

> How hard did you find it to break into dev with a few years of ops experience? Can I safely assume that getting a website up with some custom code hosted on github would be enough to get my foot in the door?

I was lucky and a former employer had an opening for a webdev, and having left on good terms they gave me a shot. Worked my butt off and got proficient, played around with other languages and frameworks in my spare time and built up a portfolio. So yes, play around with some different thing and build up a github account, but don't be afraid to commit to other projects either. In fact, if I were to go back I would have done a lot more of that since most of the code you will work on in your career will be to work on existing code. In my current role I do defect fixes only - never writing any new code. When I was doing raw web development, it was about 70% new 30% old - read as much code as possible to see how other people do things.

HTH!

Pretty much un-related, but I have a question about going from the Ops side of the aisle over to Dev.

A bit of background on me:

• BS in Computer Science
  
  
• Been doing Linux Ops work for the last 5 years
  
  
• Config management, automation, version control, blah, blah, blah.
  
  
• I've been picking up Python for a bit, and am working on some Django based stuff in my free time.
  
  Anyway, on to some questions:
  
  
• Do you have any book recommendations that don't treat me like I'm new to programming? http://www.amazon.com/Software-Engineer-Learns-JavaScript-jQuery/dp/1493692615 Looks interesting. But the vast majority of material moves far too slow for my taste. I haven't done a lot of web development, so something that shows me how all the pieces fit together quick would be great.
  
  
• How hard did you find it to break into dev with a few years of ops experience? Can I safely assume that getting a website up with some custom code hosted on github would be enough to get my foot in the door?