One of the major regrets in life is that I didn\'t do something with my introver

Question

One of the major regrets in life is that I didn't do something with my introversion. I didn't manage to get past the first year of college because of that. I have chosen the path where there are no video games and other time sinks, all I have is the internet to quench my thirst of learning the ins and outs of the field of Web Developing/Designing. Though currently, I'm taking a Web Design Associate course at one of the best Computer Arts and this is the last month of the class.

Even though I'm still a sapling, I love this field so much. So basically, At school I'm learning web design while at home I'm teaching myself web-developing.

First thing first, returning to college seems impossible at the moment because of some financial problems.

I'm pretty comfortable with CSS and HTML and I'm into PHP/MySQL at the moment. Could you please provide me a web-development Curriculum to follow. And do I need to learn about the theories behind?

And I think I'm still young(I'm 18 at the time of writing). Is it a good thing or bad thing for choosing this path? I'm glad with my decision but in all honesty, I'm worrying about my future and employment because I'm an undergrad, coming from a country where companies are degree b!tches, it saddens me so.

Thank you.

Explanation / Answer

I question the wisdom of asking programmers for life advice :) but with the caveat that everyone's path is best left to themselves, here's my little thoughts:

If finances are tight, learning enough to make money wouldn't be a bad starting point. I see dozens of requests for PHP/MySQL programmers daily, and while I wouldn't imagine liking any of those positions for long, they might be just the springboard you need to make some money while learning how to program. If you want to go down this route, I suggest starting at the PHP Security Manual. (Mostly because too many PHP programmers never learn how to avoid cross-site scripting problems or SQL injection attacks. You can write bad code in any language, but PHP seems to be a haven for bad programs.)

Learning Ruby on Rails would let you build sophisticated web sites quickly, but it requires a little more discipline than PHP coding to get started. Learning about the reasons for the discipline may take years :) but the short version is "an ounce of prevention vs a pound of cleaning up after bad code". The usual introduction is the Pragmatic Programmers Agile Web Development with Ruby on Rails. (The URL is for the beta version of the next book, which ought to be out soon. Still a great starting point.)

Since so much of web design is usability, legibility, and following conventions, I strongly recommend reading A List Apart.

As for what to actually do, I would recommend making a website that interests you. If you love fishing, put together a website to accept posts from fellow anglers about their favorite fishing spots, and look into what's required for adding Google Maps integration, add a fish database, and so on. If you're really into math, try building a calculator. Keep adding features. Just pick something that you think you can work on until the wee hours of the morning for weeks on end. (Me? Addicted to answering questions on stackoverflow? Never!) Show friends, ask for input, and then try following up on it. See what you can do. :)

I think being well-rounded in abilities makes a huge difference; Roll a die to decide between Python, Ruby, C, C++, PHP, Erlang, Java, C#, JavaScript, whatever looks interesting.

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