Where to begin. I was a designer/artist, my work from 2006 http://detrus.nivr.net/ When I seriously started at the too late(?) age of 23 I had a lot of motivation, plunged ahead into semi-serious programming projects like a Flash 3D engine, made visible progress, ultimately got overwhelmed and demotivated.
Building seemingly simple common things like flashy sites, wordpress plugins, themes with some show/hide effects, sidescrolling 2D games, image pans, charts can turn into a nightmare when you have no foundation. Simple bugs can take weeks of work to fix.
These are the kinds of projects n00bs want to do, but it can take a lot more code or effort to do these common things than most can handle. With 2D sidescrollers you can run into localToGlobal problems and if you suck at math, have no clue that you should write a separate coordinate engine instead of using the API for screen positioning, nightmare ensues.
When I strayed from the tutorials I was lost. When I saw example code, I was usually lost. There were very few examples that would give the right foundation in the context of building a thumbnail site or 2D scroller. A lot of the code was horrible and I didn't know it. I've seen people here starting with Ruby that have better luck. I've seen people starting in JS that have it worse.
Figuring out this kind of crap took months. Yes I still think it's all crap. Learning resources are usually made by people with years of experience, who have long forgotten what it's like to be clueless. Programming languages, APIs, frameworks, engines, are geared for those with years of experience. By programmers, for programmers, or at least for people with a science/math slant.
It can be fixed with effort on the scale of jQuery for every single domain. Meanwhile many people who try will lose motivation because they'll fail to accomplish anything presentable after weeks of effort.
Building seemingly simple common things like flashy sites, wordpress plugins, themes with some show/hide effects, sidescrolling 2D games, image pans, charts can turn into a nightmare when you have no foundation. Simple bugs can take weeks of work to fix.
These are the kinds of projects n00bs want to do, but it can take a lot more code or effort to do these common things than most can handle. With 2D sidescrollers you can run into localToGlobal problems and if you suck at math, have no clue that you should write a separate coordinate engine instead of using the API for screen positioning, nightmare ensues.
When I strayed from the tutorials I was lost. When I saw example code, I was usually lost. There were very few examples that would give the right foundation in the context of building a thumbnail site or 2D scroller. A lot of the code was horrible and I didn't know it. I've seen people here starting with Ruby that have better luck. I've seen people starting in JS that have it worse.
Figuring out this kind of crap took months. Yes I still think it's all crap. Learning resources are usually made by people with years of experience, who have long forgotten what it's like to be clueless. Programming languages, APIs, frameworks, engines, are geared for those with years of experience. By programmers, for programmers, or at least for people with a science/math slant.
It can be fixed with effort on the scale of jQuery for every single domain. Meanwhile many people who try will lose motivation because they'll fail to accomplish anything presentable after weeks of effort.