Trying to level up @ computers.

[Norm4eva]

So yeah, there's no reason in the world that I should be so woefully inept at computers.

What do I mean, 'at computers'?  I mean like, just grokking them as a whole.  I don't need to be a 'power user', but I realize when I start talking to my friends that I'm definitely behind the curve here.

Rewind to 1980-something, when I'm 8 years old and the nerdiest kid I knew.  I was writing programs in BASIC and discussing PC vs Mac on the elementary school playground, keeping up on hardware specs and the latest gaming trends, etc.  Then junior high happened and I found theater and guitar.  High school, more of the same.  After high school I dick around a bunch, play lots of guitar and learn how to play Magic and start bands instead of have jobs.  I turn 25 and get married, decide maybe jobs ain't so bad, get a few layoffs in the shittiest recent years of the American economy, and suddenly I find myself in this tech support job for a software company, where I don't *have* to know how computers work, just how our software interacts with OSX - but again, here I am, realizing that somewhere along the line I traded lines of code for girls and guitars, and now that I'm 30 and married and I want/need those skills again, I find myself with about 18 years of catch-up learning to do.

I recently went through most of Zed Shaw's 'Learn Python the Hard Way' in an effort to get back into programming, and I definitely want more.  I get lost in Nomenclature-ville when it comes to trying to really dig in, though.  The hands of fate have dropped a few computers in my lap over the last few years (since I couldn't really afford to just upgrade or replace older ones), but they're all Windows-based and I hear that life is pretty good on the Linux side - but again, I'm in this place where it's like, where do I start?

So what are my basic goals then?

- I want to be smart enough to write a web-app
- I want to be knowledgeable enough to maintain my own computer's hardware/software - not necessarily build my own, but just be able to fix what breaks

Basically I just want to know what the fuck I'm talking about, just enough that I'm smarter than the average bear when it comes to owning and using a computer.  So I'm asking some of the other nerdiest people I know, Magic players.  I'd love to just take the 'jump in and swim' approach, but as it happens there are a lot of shitty resources out there, and also a lot of resources that assume a certain level of understanding.  What's the "For Dummies" approach that I'm looking for here?

[The Atog Lord]

I love computers. In fourth grade, I started to type up all of my homework since my handwriting is basically illegible. I got straight C's in penmanship. I've been programming since I was in high school, spending my algebra class typing away on my TI-82. I started programming for real in Turbo Pascal on 386 machines. These were so old that they had floppy disks that were actually floppy, and had ``turbo'' buttons on the side that actually made them run faster. These days, I have two Masters degrees in computer science, and I'm working on my doctorate. I love computers.

Alright, enough reminiscing from me. If you want to learn a beautiful programming language, and learn how to develop web pages, I very highly recommend Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails is a framework that uses the Ruby language to create web pages. It ties together HTML for the front end and SQL for the backend, in a unified environment. Ruby on Rails is used by a number of popular websites, including Twitter and Groupon. Best of all, Ruby on Rails has a wealth of online resources available, provided by a devoted community. Google will answer most of your questions.

For myself, I use Ruby (the programming language) and Ruby on Rails (the web development framework) all the time. Ruby is a flexible, powerful scripting language. It is a joy to program in, and while I've been using it as my main language for years (grad school generally lets you use whatever language you like), I'm still discovering more about it. Ruby on Rails has allowed me to build many, many websites for my research over the past few years; I even wrote richshay.com in Rails 3.1 as a learning exercise.

So, that is my suggestion to you. If you'd like to start learning Ruby, and Ruby on Rails, all of the tools that you'll need are entirely free. OSX comes with Ruby and Rails installed already, and you can download them for free in other operating systems. I highly recommend Michael Hartl's excellent Ruby on Rails tutorial for learning about Ruby on Rails (http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book).

Best of luck with this.

[Delha]

Basically I just want to know what the fuck I'm talking about, just enough that I'm smarter than the average bear when it comes to owning and using a computer.

Honestly, I think you probably already are. The average bear is pretty fucking dumb when it comes to computers.

More power to you possessing drive regarding self improvement, I've never taken the time out to learn programming despite it being something I've been interested in for quite a while now. I'm not at all suggesting that you should stop, just that I'd bet money that you're already ahead of the curve.

[Norm4eva]

I love computers. In fourth grade, I started to type up all of my homework since my handwriting is basically illegible. I got straight C's in penmanship. I've been programming since I was in high school, spending my algebra class typing away on my TI-82. I started programming for real in Turbo Pascal on 386 machines. These were so old that they had floppy disks that were actually floppy, and had ``turbo'' buttons on the side that actually made them run faster. These days, I have two Masters degrees in computer science, and I'm working on my doctorate. I love computers.

Alright, enough reminiscing from me. If you want to learn a beautiful programming language, and learn how to develop web pages, I very highly recommend Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails is a framework that uses the Ruby language to create web pages. It ties together HTML for the front end and SQL for the backend, in a unified environment. Ruby on Rails is used by a number of popular websites, including Twitter and Groupon. Best of all, Ruby on Rails has a wealth of online resources available, provided by a devoted community. Google will answer most of your questions.

For myself, I use Ruby (the programming language) and Ruby on Rails (the web development framework) all the time. Ruby is a flexible, powerful scripting language. It is a joy to program in, and while I've been using it as my main language for years (grad school generally lets you use whatever language you like), I'm still discovering more about it. Ruby on Rails has allowed me to build many, many websites for my research over the past few years; I even wrote richshay.com in Rails 3.1 as a learning exercise.

So, that is my suggestion to you. If you'd like to start learning Ruby, and Ruby on Rails, all of the tools that you'll need are entirely free. OSX comes with Ruby and Rails installed already, and you can download them for free in other operating systems. I highly recommend Michael Hartl's excellent Ruby on Rails tutorial for learning about Ruby on Rails (http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book).

Best of luck with this.

Downloading the Windows installer as we speak.  I've been a little hesitant to do Ruby, just because I made so much headway with Python, but I also know they're really really similar.  In fact I'd been experimenting just a little with Flask, which takes a lot of cues from Sinatra - then I realized that I didn't understand the relationship between the WSGI and the info it was serving, nor did I know much about the HTML/JavaScript/CSS it was serving.  It's just interesting to see the wide world of modules and languages that a person seems to need to know in order to effectively program - writing a Python program using a WSGI based on one written for Ruby to serve HTML to a browser...