Getting Started

Most people don't realize how little start-up investment you really need to learn some relevant programming skills. All you really need is any browser (even ie), any text editor (even notepad), and a simple guide. A book is cheap, but if you have internet (which I assume, since you're reading this) then you can google for HTML & javascript tutorials and exercises.

The only thing you really need is dedication and time. From there, you can learn anything... and I can help.

I understand that not everyone learns well from a book, or even a scripted web tutorial. Some people just need personal attention, and some benefit tremendously from a group. If you have a real interest in learning, find what works for you and do that.

I've spent two decades teaching and learning. I've taught high school classes, not just in programming, but in Latin, literature, government & economics, earth science, and even karate. I've conducted the occasional seminar and spent a lot of hours in one on one sessions over web teleconferencing sessions. I've worked as an individual tutor and as a lab assistant, helping people read memory dump printouts and find logical errors. I've taught professionals how to write UNIX shell scripts with automated global logging, exception handling and reporting, and I've written complex modules in Perl that created subroutines on the fly when needed to parse packed decimal fields from files compressed in EBCDIC and never converted.

I've programmed and taught tricks in Assembler, ForTran, CoBOL, C, Pascal, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, ksh, JCL, SQL, HTML, Javascript, and complex regular expressions. I've written scripts and programs that continue to process many, many terabytes of data for Fortune 100 companies to this day, and in all that time, you know what I've learned?

Everything I know about computers and programming, that's what. I learned it on the job, and in training classes, and from books and web pages and from my peers. I learned a ton by teaching other folk.

Blowing my own horn? Well, sorry, it's the only one I have, but I don't think you should give me your trust and your money without knowing why.