Title: Greetings,<p>I am a recent college graduate (as of this past May) and I studied chemistry and physics. I have plans to go to graduate school within a year for theoretical and computational chemical physics - that's basically fancy talk for predicting physical interactions between molecules using high performance computing. I have some experience in the field from working as a research assistant as an undergrad and while I never had any problems with the physics, I struggled a little bit with the coding aspect because of lack of previous exposure.<p>I also read this post "To founders who can't code"<p>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1761530<p>It really hit home. I have had two failed ventures thus far which likely would have taken off better if I had the coding abilities to make my own demo. Instead I took the seed funding I received and hired people to do it for me - long story short things didn't work out; I lost money and disappointed people.<p>The author of the aforementioned post recommends that noncoder founders should: "Take 6 months off and go learn how to code (day and night, weekends including)."
This is what I would like to do but I am unsure as to how to begin. Sure, there is a wealth of sources but I am unsure of which ones are quality sources and also what languages to learn first. I am not trying to be a coder or hacker overnight and my approach is methodical: I will devote 8-10 hours per week to learning. I generally pick up things fast; the key though, is having interesting problems to solve which increase in order of difficulty.<p>If anyone can give me a few pointers on how I can start learning (what resources are good, what language to begin with, a good program of studies) that would be much appreciated as it would help me develop my future ideas on my own and would probably also help with my research. I thought a cool initial project would be an applet which queries each line of a word document with book titles (I keep a running list of all the books I’ve read, one per line in a doc) and searches the net for a picture of a book cover and imports it into the app. Apologies for my ignorance but would this be a realistic project within 6 months?<p>Lastly, I did run a search on this but didn’t find any related threads; I apologize if this Q has come up before.<p>Thanks for your advice,
AKD
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