Hello helpful community I’m new here to the forums and kind of an amateur programmer so ill introduce myself and ask some questions if you guys don’t mind I’m 26 and currently in collage majoring in information systems and about to graduate. My interests are as follows math and statistics as im fascinated with numbers, randomness and probability along with graphics, cryptography, DBMs, app design, programming, data compression, networking, security in addition to that im an avid gamer and a good pianist . I want to master all my interests and wish a day had more than 24 hrs :-/ …having this variety of interests renders me shattered and unfortunately unable to focus on one thing. Throughout my life ive been able to accomplish almost every task I encountered that require programming, but mostly by using others code, so basically a skid who took it for granted but now I want to change that for more control over my projects. I have the capacity/appetite to learn most programming languages but only master a few major ones like c/c++ and java and after reading an article on this topic, I realized and actually don’t mind that its might take around 10 years/10,000 hours to do so, but the question remains, where to start learning? And is it too late for a 26 yr old to go down that road? I hear people start learning at age of 5! Anyway, my cousin who is a successful computer engineer (owning his own company) got his computer engineer degree/Masters from England in which he assures me was a big waste of time and advices me not to waste time and energy going physically to a computer science university/course as online content/courses are as good as and maybe even better. Long story short, I am looking for guidance on a comprehensive professional online course/ a good place to start. Ive been scouting for reviews for sometime but im confused and can’t set my mind due to the similarity of these websites, possibility of scam/bad content, bias reviews and what not… and looking for someone with personal experience to help me find the ultimate online course. The cost is not an issue as the quality so some criteria have to be present. 1. I am not looking for “learn programming in 2 days” rather looking for those 10,000 hrs. if possible^. 2. Ability to practice my knowledge; learning the syntax of a programming language is a very easy task and what makes the difference is the assignments, projects, community collaboration, infinite debugging, exception handling etc. 3. it has to have a good way of relaying information to me such as videos. 4. Best bang for my buck; Variety of content, possibly extending to other interests of mine and not focusing solely on programming. (not a requirement) So Basically I’m looking for quality. Also any advice on good Books/ebooks would be appreciated . One last question, how come this forum doesn’t require email verification? (its a first for me)
