What computer "thing" should I learn?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’d like to learn something new about computers, only I don’t know what. I’m not even completely sure what my options are. Basically, I know my way around the internet, am good with all the Microsoft Word applications, and can use a couple other apps like iTunes, Microtorrent, Picasa, and solitaire. And that’s about it. So what next??

My goal is partly self-improvement, and partly to boost my resume, or even to learn something well enough to be able to make a few bucks on the side through freelance. Unfortunately, I don’t have the money or the schedule to take a class - this is going to have to be self-taught through either online tutorials or library books. Also, it can’t involve learning a program/application that costs tons of money (see above about being broke).

What do you think? What’s useful/marketable/learnable? HTML? Some programming language? Photoshop? What?

2

If you have a good sized library theHead First books by O’Reilly are easy and excellent ways to start out.

The days of learning simple HTML and making a site are over. People want more. HTML is great if you want to learn how it’s really done and should be done. Especially that HTML5 is going to be out <knock wood> soon.

For websites, HTML (and it’s variant XHTML) is a solid foundation. Then you want to move on to JavaScript. Then you would want a server side programming language. PHP is a good choice.

And you can learn them from books and online forums will help you.

If you go to Dynamic Drive and look around and look at their forums it will help you choose.

If you want to earn money a good way is fixing computers. Or learning basic things like how to install a new hard drive, how to install RAM and such. You can earn a bit of change putting local ads in CL.

Would you like to make your own apps. OK then you’re going to have to learn a language such as C++ or C#. Others can draw you in about that.

Whatever you want to do, you have to make sure it’ll hold your interest because you’ll get bored. For instance, I know how to use Photoshop, I gave this guy lessons in it. He’s an artist, I am not. He loved it. He and I worked for two hours. I would show him the brushes and what they did and explained the layers and he showed me about lighting and shading and in two hours we made a magnifying glass.

OK I am not that patient. Oh it was a darn nice magnifying glass but I am not spending two hours doing that!!! He loved to do that and went on to use Photoshop a lot. So you see even though I know how to use Photoshop and what everything is for, I’m not artistic enough to really do anything with it.

This is why if you want to learn a program, make sure it’s something you love to do.

I would ask, what do you do for a living, what kinds of computer programs do they use. Learn those, now that’s impressive at review time to tell your boss you learned about software the company uses on your own time. Plus it goes on a resume.

3

Depends a bit how old you are as learning a programming language is like, well, learning a language - the younger you are the better. Your other choices - HTML as a road to Web design, Photoshop - are much more achievable, but I guess the key thing is - what else are you interested in? What hobbies and personal interests do you have?

4

What the heck are the “Microsoft Word applications”?

5

Thanks - awesome advice so far.

What’s CL?

The idea of making new apps is cool, though I’m not sure how complex that is…and I don’t have ideas for what apps to make!

Good point - I guess it’ll be trial and error.

I work in a very non-tech savvy office…we only use e-mail and MS Office, and believe it or not, as slim as my knowledge is I definitely know more about computers than anyone else. Of course, that means there’s lots of room for growth potential…

I’m 30 - so youngish (I think?) but no spring chicken. As for hobbies and interests, I can’t say I want to learn this to further any existing hobbies, but, maybe, to learn some new ones? Guess I just feel like I should know some more, and that I need to make myself more marketable.
One thing I forgot to add: I only have a laptop. Does that limit what I can learn?

6

Ha - meant Microsoft Office, to include Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint…

7

Based on context, I’d say Craigslist.

8

Learn python.

Write a text editor(like notepad) and/or image viewer in tkinter or wxWidgets using python. Based on your other knowledge, this should be in easy grasp. A few hours work at the most.

At that point you will understand something else about the workings of your computer, and you’ll have an idea of whether programming suits you.

9

I’d agree that learning to program would be a great idea. Something like Python or whatever language MS uses for Excel these days, is it still a variant of Visual Basic?

If you search for tutorials you should be able to find books, illustrated HTML tutorials, and even videos to help.

10

I think you should learn how to set up, maintain and use a good relational database. Using MySQL or MS SQL Express or something.

Trying to explain to lay people how databases work, or should work, is like pulling teeth. People just don’t get it. Like, they don’t need to know how to program SQL so anything involving a database is like magic to them.

If you could just understand how such things work, you could go places.

Catalog your book or CD collection, adding lots of extra layers to expand what you can do with the data. You’ll be a superstar.

11

I’ve designed and run a few websites for work hobbies (like conferences) and I’ve observed that even very technically savvy non-programmers get impressed by very simple things.

Being an old timer, I do lots of stuff in Perl, but any of the languages mentioned with which you can do cool stuff on web pages would be first fun and second serve as a good sample of what you can do for potential clients. Don’t worry too much which one you pick - once you learn to program, the rest will be fairly easy to learn. I’d put off C++ for much later, since it is probably more than you are going to need. I handle millions of lines of data in Perl - I know C++ would be faster, but for the stuff I do speed of coding and reuse of stuff I’ve done already is far more important than raw speed.

My daughter and her husband made some money retouching wedding photos using PhotoShop. You need to really enjoy photography for it to be very useful. I use it to play around with logos and the like, but I’ve found it pretty impenetrable not having that kind of background.

Once you learn to program, you might be interested in doing apps for Android phones. I say Android to start since it is a lot more open than iPhones.

12

I would give my eyeteeth, except I don’t have 'em anymore, to learn how to “do” a database. How do I got about it? Where do I find the tutorials? Sorry for the hijack, although the OP might like this suggestion too.

13

Learn Cloud applications well. All the ins and outs of the ‘sharing’ options; how to use the advanced features, etc. For example, learn Google’s Apps (their word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, file manager, drawing tool, etc.) as well or better than you know Office. Guaranteed people will have more and more interest in these ‘cloud’ apps, and how to make them work with, and sometime, in place of, Microsoft apps. It will be good for your career, and not totally unfamiliar since you already know web basics and Office.

Also, learn a different browser – say, Firefox or Chrome, if you’re used to only IE. Learn what kinds of extensions are out there and might be useful to your line of work. Maybe one of these other browsers is much faster (probably) and less secure (almost certainly) that what you’re currently using.

Don’t learn python unless you’re dying to program. It’s much more than “a few hours” of effort to learn much of anything there unless you already understand a lot of programming concepts (I’m a software developer and know what I’m talking about here). If you want to dip your feet into programming, learn Excel macros, which while not “sexy” from a software standpoint, is likely to impress the hell out of your boss if you come up with something useful to do with them (and this is easily done, most places, including for making simple, and even not quite so simple, “databases”.)

14

MySQL and MS SQL Express are both free and you download them from the Web. Both of the linked sites have tutorials for setup (in my experience, installing MySQL on a Windows machine was like pulling teeth and I’ve never done it successfully, but millions of other have).

MS Access is also a database app that comes with most versions of Office. But, you use different techniques to query Access than you do MySQL or MS SQL so once you get past the database design part, Access skills become less portable while MySQL and MS SQL skills are pretty convergent.

The Web is rampant with tutorials and explanations for SQL. Lots of help comes in the form of someone posting a “how do I do this…?” thread to a message board and someone answering it. I can’t point to any specific examples. I usually just Google stuff.

Lots of time tutorials come in the form of building basic catalogs of items - usually books - and then manipulating the data in a myriad of ways. So I would suggest that anyone wanting to just up and learn database skills is to actually catalog your own book collection.

Once you’ve learned to properly set up a DB you can learn to query it to get sets of data. Once you’ve learned that, you can use any one of a vast number of programming languages and platforms to display the data.

Then, you can be the guy in the office with the answers to the brain-blowing questions such as “why can’t we have an Access copy of our database that we update by hand, and have it match our online SQL database?” and “why can’t someone type in a first and last name and get an exact match of one of our two million users?”

Fun stuff!

15

Thank you; your comment re difficulty installing the sql stuff on a windows machine is intimidating as my real computer skills consist in turning one on and off. Even so, I’ll give it a shot. Thanks again.