Reddit reviews How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens

I also strongly recommend exercises to remedy whatever difficulty you have in maths, because other than helping your depression, it also gives you extra mental alertness, and some opportunity to walk away from a problem in which you are stuck.

Trust me, most of the time the insight you need to solve a problem can only appear when you walk away ... there is a scientific backup to this; I forgot precisely which research, but it is mentioned in this book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00IWTTNZE/ref=pd_aw_sim_351_2?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=23D921MCETAWYVJJ24W8

I actually have a science-based answer for this. I read a book (actually 1.5 books on the same topic) that talked about different studies that have been done on learning, and one of the main thing it talked about is that you will progress the fastest at learning something if you mix in a few different subjects, like if you are practicing guitar you'll learn better to do a few songs at once. It's because you notice things in one song that apply to another song.

I'm explaining it bad but the books I read are these 2:

Shorter succinct cheap ebook

Longer more sciencey book

1. It sounds like your pay is lowered as a teacher due to lack of a teaching credential. If you love teaching, you could get an online teaching credential for ~8K while working. If this requires a loan, well, do the math. A repayment schedule should be quantified in your decision making and life plan, not an unknown scare factor / inflexible absolute.
   
   It could be that an online teaching cert enables you to earn the money you want in the short term for life goals, and a programming job can be a medium term goal. Or not.
   
   
2. Keep in mind that there are a lot of factors that might not apply to you when reading about developer salary. Gosh, it sounds like teachers make 70-80K a year, and 100K as a principal.
   
   Does that not apply to you? Well, there might be an analogy to be made with the market for programmers.
   On a related note: Read programming interview questions.
   
   
3. There are a lot of coding bootcamp fresh grads in the market now, changing the hiring scene for web development beginners from 2-3 years ago. I was told this by a guy who started a now >100 person software consulting agency aka an actual employer last week at a Meetup mentoring session.
   
   So find some recent bootcamp grads in your neighborhood at a Meetup, or through the school.
   
   Chat them up and check in on their job search to get a feel for the current market in your area (or your dad's area).
   
   
4. You can do it! You can certainly learn to program. Pretty awesome that there are so many free resources!
   
   
5. Read How We Learn. One of the many things I got from it was you need to try something, come back to it, come back to it again.
   
   There are so many different but interconnected things you need to learn in programming. Don't try to do them in order, expose yourself to a range of concepts now.
   So less html > css > javascript > python.
   
   More javascript and/or python + html + css +
   PLEASE LOOK UP AND TRY THESE THEY ARE USEFUL FOR ALL PROGRAMMING git + regex + learning to use your shell + debugging + especially chrome dev tools if you're working on javascript/web pages. And I recommend trying Atom as a text editor.
   
   Type every single thing, no cut and paste, no just watching. Practice by building your own version of simple things. You will mess up and get frustrated by going off the tutorial map. When you get too lost, go back to that map and study again. You will learn a ton by messing up and then sorting it. How We Learn and psychologists call it retrieval. I guess this is my version of what so many other people are saying. They're right.
   
   
6. It doesn't sound like you need books at this point. I do like books. But poke around with the stuff other people mentioned + Daniel Schiffman's Coding Rainbow, Learn Python the Hard Way, Automate the Boring Stuff With Python, the Python Bokeh tutorial, making your own web page, blog posts on git, the Rex Egg regex website. Code Ninja.
   A little later: Functional programming and clean code ideas. Sandi Metz on code smell. Code Mentor. 30 days of javascript with Wes Bos. Maybe not all of it at once. But throw a few things at the wall and see what sticks.
   
   Try reading and understanding the MDN documentation for javascript, the Python documentation. It'll be confusing. Keep trying to learn the language of documentation by going back and forth on a concept from your tutorial to the same concept in documentation.
   
   
7. It's going to be a process. A friend told me expect to be bad at programming for the first 2 years. A gal with a bio related PhD from Berkeley and a Computational Science MS from Hopkins (ie no slouch) said she felt like an ok programmer after 5 years out of grad school. She does love teaching programming though :)
   
   
8. I've been working on learning programming off and on for about a year and a half, and more diligently for about 6 months since quitting my job. I haven't started looking for a job yet.
   So take it all with a grain of unemployed-in-the-field salt.
   
   Best, a biomedical engineer that quit.