Yes, you… whoever you are.
I promise if you got yourself to this webpage and are reading this sentence then I think you have what it takes to teach yourself the fundamentals of programming, get yourself a remote job and change your life.
How do I know? Because I did it, and I have helped several other people like yourself do it.
Often people get stuck in a place called tutorial hell when teaching themselves how to code. This is a name for a spot where while you can read and understand code, you find writing your own from scratch impossible. Any time you try and sit down and make something without the aid of a tutorial you freeze.
Picking the curriculum can seem pretty overwhelming at first. There are so many choices when picking an approach to learn how to code. From boot camps, to youtube and blogs, to paid courses. It is a pretty wide spectrum and each at wildly different price points. Even within each category, there are courses that range from $10 to $400, or some sort of monthly subscription to a course platform. How on earth will you know if you pick the right thing?
Hopefully, by the end of this chapter, I will have eased any anxiety you have on this subject and you will be confident to pick up some curriculum and move forward with it. I am briefly going to share my thoughts on three categories, boot camps, free resources, and paid content, as well as share some examples I would recommend.
The first extremely important thing to realize when starting to teach yourself how to code is that this journey is different for everyone. When I mentored for a major online bootcamp, some students would pick up things in days that would take others weeks. And sometimes the ones who took weeks to understand simple topics had jobs months before the ones with whom it clicked right away. There is no winning formula. These students went to the same bootcamp, at the same time, and had the same instructor, yet their experiences differed wildly. Measuring yourself up to others is a route to frustration. Instead, you should focus entirely within yourself, trying to become the best version of you that you can be.