Ask HN: I have 18 weeks to learn whatever I want, do you have any suggestions?

This would seem like an ideal opportunity to get a solid grounding in the fundamentals of programming. I would suggest that you work through the MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) version of their "Introduction to Computer Science and Programming" (the newer version that uses Python as its teaching language). You would be learning Python while you are learning the fundamentals. The course uses a freely available textbook, and video lectures are available. The course website is located at "http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput....

You may choose to learn Ruby properly first and then start learning Ruby on Rails. This list of free programming resources might be helpful to you: http://stackoverflow.com/a/392926

Upon doing some more research and compiling a list of things to go through I've found the following:

http://guides.rubyonrails.org/

http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-comput...

http://manwithcode.com/299/making-games-with-ruby-ep-1-intro...

http://learn.knockoutjs.com/#/?tutorial=intro

http://peepcode.com/

http://railsforzombies.org/

http://ruby.railstutorial.org/

http://citizen428.net/blog/2010/08/12/30-free-programming-eb...

http://www.trybloc.com/courses/ruby-warrior/chapters/beginne...

and I've completed: http://tryruby.org/levels/1/challenges/1

- just for those interested in the progress I've made so far

If you want some "down and dirty" simply practical knowledge, read up on regular expressions. (Be sure to read up on the better cautions associated with using them, as well.) I would recommend Jeffrey Friedl's book, "Mastering Regular Expressions".

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596528126.do

One other caveat about this, though. They make more sense and the topic is more motivating when you have a significant amount of text munging to accomplish (as I did, at one point).

Nonetheless, I remember some years ago being astonished at some of the Java code I saw being written, at not insignificant amounts of programmer time and with a bevy of mistakes, to accomplish simple pattern matching in use cases where a regular expression would have been more appropriate and more efficient -- both to write and probably in execution.

The developers, despite being fairly seasoned, just weren't familiar with the paradigm. A few years later, they were using them "all over the place".

I would also like to recommend that you do some work in javascript. It has arguably become one of the most important programming languages around, and only becoming more so.

Also, since js is prototypal instead of class-based, its a different way of thinking about writing code. I have known many good programmers that had a hell of a time working with javascript as its meant, and they constantly try to write js with classes. If you learn both ways early on, you'll be a much better programmer later. Neither will seem alien to you.

I would recommend that the first javascript book you read is Javascript the Good Parts by Douglas Crockford. Its only about 150 pages and only talks about the language. Nothing to do with web browsers. Read it a couple times and start doing some simple js apps and you'll be in good shape.

One way you can go about learning is to find something you really feel passionate about building. Then try to find the best way possible to build it.

1. Bayesian filtering, etc

2. Neural Networks

3. How to make money