Recently, several friends told me they had been learning some programming basics using Codecademy and they were trying to figure out where to go next and how to apply what they learned in the real world. Even more, they wanted to learn enough to switch careers and become professional programmers and wanted to know if I could help, since I had recently done the same thing on my own in about 9 months.

This guide is for them, but it may be useful to anyone in the same situation.

How should this guide be used?

As someone starting out, there are entirely too many things to learn. While all of those things might be worth learning, you need choose a few things to the exclusion of others. When you are just starting out, your biggest enemy is analysis paralysis. Worrying about which language or tool you should use can fill the hours that you should just be learning something. For the purposes of getting started…

Do not worry if you are learning the right thing or using the right tools… That’s what this guide is for.

This guide will tell you what to learn and roughly how long to spend on each concept before moving on.

What technologies will be covered?

I spoke to the recruiter who got my my job and asked him what I should be teaching new developers looking to get their first programming jobs.

The answer? (in his words)

Javascript, Javascript, Javascript! They should become extremely comfortable with HTML and CSS and be able to code a responsive website and be comfortable using jQuery and a front-end JavaScript framework, such as Angular.js or Ember.

I’m currently leaning toward Ember, so we’re going to focus on that after you have a little experience with CSS and JavaScript.

This is a highly opinionated guide. The purpose is not to give you an understanding of every programming language and framework under the sun, but to give you a clear path toward being a useful programmer who can build cool/useful things.