At what age should I become an EMT-Paramedic?

How can I become a really good Web Developer starting from now (at age 20) before age 25?

• I am a 20 year old man, and I suffer from Asperger's Syndrome a mild form of Autism, and I have recently decided to learn web design/web development as I am very interested in internet entrepreneurship - I now realise that rather than paying someone (a web designer/developer) to create my Internet projects, I'd be best to teach myself how to program computers and learn web development myself. I ask, what is the best way to become a brilliant web developer/programmer from scratch in 5 years or less from my current age of 20 to age 25?

• Answer:

  Couldn't be happier that you're interested in web development. I like some of the other answers I see, but I feel like there are still major pieces missing to the puzzle. Don't get into development for the wrong reason. I fell in love with development when I was 12. Not because I wanted to be an internet entrepreneur and make the next greatest thing, but because of the instant gratification development often provides. There is no feeling like being able to fiddle with a few lines of code and drastically change what you're working on and not having to wait more than a refresh or a build to see the outcome. While doing client work, it was often that I was being called because the client had attempted to build something on their own (spending quite a bit of their own time and making a lot of personal sacrifices) and wasn't happy with the result because they didn't turn out to be the developer they had figured they would be. (HTML for Dummies said they would be an expert in no time, after all!) Bottom line here is: if you don't genuinely have a passion for at least one of the countless aspects of web development in its entirety, then I would take a step back. If you are intrigued by web development and want to make a career out of it... Understand what web development is and where you expect to be. As mentioned above, there are a million different aspects to web development. Are you making a small blog? Cool, WordPress and a $5/month web host can get you off and away with little to no HTML/CSS experience. Are you thinking of building a small web community that no existing CMS or software can handle? Well, you're going to need a server-side language to handle interacting with a database, handling user requests and keeping track of a user's session. If you plan on doing anything with Ajax on the front-end, you'll also need the back-end language to build web services. Then, of course you'll need to know HTML to put stuff on a page in a way that is understandable to your users, and then CSS to make it pretty, and then JS to handle interactions, Ajax requests, and/or special effects. Are you thinking that you want to launch a huge corporate website that handles a crazy amount of traffic? Your first problem is getting to this point (and if you're at this point and don't have a team to handle the different responsibilities then you might be sleep deprived and should see a doctor). The second problem is on top of everything mentioned above, you need to understand the IT portion to handle multiple servers, load balancing, etc. You're probably going to run into performance issues so you'll need a caching architecture to handle serving common content repeatedly without constantly pinging your production database. This could continue on... Where you fit in... My goal is not to scare you out of development, but to give you a picture of how complex the web is in reality. It would be best for you to think about the big picture and decide where you want to start before you worry about becoming "really good". Front-end development is always a nice entry-level way to get involved in web development. It requires the understanding of HTML/CSS and often JavaScript. From here you'll have a good foundation to either end up becoming a Senior Front-end / UI Developer, or switching to the backend and writing languages such as Java, PHP, Ruby, Python, etc. Where should you start? Get involved in the community. Whip open your favorite RSS reader and create a new category. Add the likes of Jeffrey Zeldman, Molly Holzschlag, Jeremy Keith, Eric Meyer, Bryan Veloso, Jason Kottke, Ben Alman, Paul Irish, Rebecca Murphy, Jonathan Snook (and a crazy ton more I've missed) to your blog roll. Follow them on Twitter and follow the suggested users related to them. Start communicating and reading blog posts (and subsequently the comments on those posts and commenting yourself). Buy up some books and read! Books about technology are often a tough investment to make because they grow outdated so quickly. I tend to try to pick up ePub versions where I can and only get print copies of books that speak in general about practices or architecture. A few front-end book suggestions (hopefully some backend guys can shed light on their favorite books for their preferred languages): SMACSS (free version available): http://smacss.com/ Bulletproof Web Design: http://www.simplebits.com/publications/bulletproof/ A Book Apart Series: http://www.abookapart.com/ O'Reilly books: http://oreilly.com/css-html/index.html Practice, challenge yourself and work for other people. When I started many years ago, I would recode other websites for fun or do non-profit websites for free just to get the experience. Developing a site for yourself is completely different than doing development work for someone else. Also take presented challenges head-on and do your best to tackle them, it's the only way you can grow. Be honest and never oversell yourself to the people you work with, having an unhappy client can be demoralizing and kill your motivation to continue the practice. My final thought... I've seen far too many people get into development because of seeing pretty salary marks or the culture of various companies. Being a developer is not about either of these -- especially since neither are a given perk; however, being a developer is about caring passionately about what you do and the product you build / deliver. You'll be a much happier programmer when you care about your own technical abilities more than the perks of being in development. I'll stop here, but feel free to chat with me on Twitter (@ryanbarr) and ask to your hearts content about web development as a whole, what I do or why the sky is blue.