Due to an unforeseen turn of budgetary cutbacks, I now find myself with a summer full of free time. Unfortunately, my job has left me woefully out of date on the latest software trends. I’m up to speed on Access 2003, SQL Server mgmt. studio 2003 (or whatever it is), old-timey ASP, and that’s about it. I never did learn ASP.NET or VB.NET, and I was not up to date on those 10 years ago.
What do I need to learn in order to make myself marketable again, and how can I learn it with no budget and only a crappy laptop?
My husband likes to listen to the free lectures from MIT and IIT (Indian Institutes of Technology). There are plenty of programming courses there, free to listen and watch. He prefers IIT, fwiw.
Can you afford anything at all? If so, I can highly recommend PluralSight. They have online courses on about a gazillion different tech topics, and I’ve gone through several of them. They’re high-quality and up-to-date.
One thing I really like Pluralsight for over a lot of similar places is that it also has transcripts of the lectures, and you can switch between the transcript and the video just by clicking on the sentence you’re on. That way, you can read through the intros and the stuff you already know, and when you get to something you really want to watch, you just click and you’re there. Really handy for going a little faster through parts of the course that you don’t feel you need to concentrate on.
There’s a free trial. Even if you don’t have any budget at all, I’d highly suggest taking advantage of that.
I was in a similar boat last year and sort of got myself up-to-date on web technologies - at least enough to understand what all the acronyms meant in advertised job requirements :smack:. I’d advise first considering what direction you’d like to head in before jumping in with learning anything.