Advice for a female getting into programming as 2nd career?

I would honestly start with http://www.codecademy.com. It's so simple, friendly, and non-daunting, and it teaches you the basic (transferable) concepts of programming pretty quickly. It would function extremely well as a refresher course. As far as which languages - Javascript, Ruby and Python seem to be the trendiest ones around, in descending order. Currently there are lots of jobs for Ruby and Objective-C (iOS) programmers, but I can see Javascript quickly ascending there too. All three of those are relatively straightforward and friendly, and none would be a bad choice.

This might be too much like going back to school, but if your friend has 10 weeks and $12k, http://www.hackbrightacademy.com/about was made for people like her. (You get $4.5k back if you get a job with one of their affiliates. I think there are also financial aid options.)

By solving the problems on http://projecteuler.net/, I have found my ability to code has improved immensely. I had taken some online "courses" in Python, but I usually just burned out after a while because a lot of the things seemed boring. On Project Euler, you have to figure everything out from scratch. So, I'd point her toward that site as a site for "exercises," or at least ones which are entertaining and challenging.

Sorry to sternly disagree with d.z., but seriously, pretty much all the people I know hiring programmers (at very good startups and bigger companies alike) would be extremely suspicious of a self-taught Haskell programmer. Folks that pride themselves on doing The Hardest Thing often make crappy employees because they are both a) not actually that good and b) total prima donnas when it comes to what they work on. Don't make your barrier to entry absurdly high. There's nothing wrong with learning Ruby (or Javascript or PHP even) if you find it easy to learn and fun to work with. I'll also say this: if you have no CS background at all, even as a brilliant math person, the kind of work you're going to be able to get hired to do will be pretty basic stuff for a long time. You need to learn the languages that people do basic stuff in. Ruby, PHP, Javascript, Python are all good examples. You can also teach yourself Scala or Haskell or Java or C++ or whatever, but it will take you a lot of time to get to where you are anywhere near someone with a CS degree working in those languages because they just take a long time to learn and there's a lot of engineering background you need to absorb. I'm teaching some self-taught js programmers on my team Java and it's great, but they have been working in industry for years, are studying a lot on their own, and it still requires all the Java devs on my team to take turns doing some pretty serious mentoring. So, yes, the programming language does matter, because the amount of framework cruft you have to cut through to be productive is vastly different between different languages, and the kind of work you can get hired to do is very different, and the barriers to entry are much higher for certain languages. The language doesn't matter if you have a CS degree from a great school but your friend is not in that fortunate scenario, and so the language will absolutely matter. I hire Java programmers to write big systems and I expect them to have strong algorithmic backgrounds. I hire Javascript programmers to make stuff show up on the website and I expect them to be able to answer programming questions but not necessarily implement big complex systems.

1. The programming language doesn't matter, all programming is pretty much the same. 2. The challenge is not the language, it's the thought process. 3. Does she actually have any interest in software as a career? 4. It is not a quick process to go from zero to hirable. It is very hard to get hired as a developer without a relevant degree just because it's hard enough to filter people out as is. If she is out of work and this is her plan, she needs a new plan. 5. There are many, many basic courses on Coursera and one of them is starting this coming month (in this case, in Python). I highly encourage her to do this.

I personally don't have experience, however my husband does and I have gotten earfuls about him trying to decide what languages to learn. He ended up being a college drop out and works now as a system administrator. Also note that many of the people he works with are also college drop outs/second career. (He also had a few women bosses.) The way he decided what to focus on as far as learning programming languages was first looking for jobs that he found interesting. The job postings then provided what languages they were looking for. He finally chose his starting points based on which languages were most requested in the jobs that he found suitable for a career. (That is going to be based on personal preference.) I know he learned most of what he does through being self-taught. He worked his way through a lot of e-books on the programming languages. He also started personal projects. Personally, being a woman in a business world, although programming may be male-dominated I think as long as she has skills that will be all they are looking for. To summarize: 1) Find jobs that interest her - there are tons of languages and tons of different programming jobs. (Web design, systems and servers, security, etc.) 2) Find a common language(s) among the jobs. 3) Research for E-Books, online training courses, and just jump into projects for those specific languages. Hope it helps!

Hacker School would be great for her, especially if she can get one of the Etsy grants to attend (school is free, grant covers your living expenses while you're there). http://www.etsy.com/blog/news/2012/etsy-hacker-grants-supporting-women-in-technology/ and http://www.etsy.com/hacker-grants

This is in Seattle, WA. Sorry, should've mentioned that.

See this thread http://ask.metafilter.com/236527/Summer-Winter-of-Code. Check my post there: I like the high placement rate.