What to ask a newbie in IT to help guide him?

[Du1point8]

Offered to help out someone that has got an interest in programming and is doing it all off his own back and is learning HTML and CSS to a medium level, but wants to know where to go from there.

Is there a list of questions (search not working very well and I know its been done before) that can be asked to work out and establish what advice should be given as to what tech stack he should look at depending on his answers?

There are many many different ways this could pan out:

GUI
Server side
Back end
Bit of all

MS tech stack
JAVA and independants

Web developer (platforms)
Pure GUI Web/Windows
DBA


Well you get the message.

[shtu]

I'd suggest he pays out a relatively small sum for an HP Microserver (sub-£100, look around), and loads it with a prebuilt LAMP stack.

At least a passing familiarity with how it all slots together, plus the ability to work with data-driven systems, will make his HTML and CSS skills more relevant.

[james_gt3rs]

Are they in a position to get a computer science degree?

[andy-xr]

I'm a sales guy and when I went into an opensource company part of their training program for me was to install Virtualbox and set up a VM running a LAMP stack with specific versions of Centos/MySQL then talk them through how I did it

[Du1point8]

Hes not in a position to actually afford to do anything like what has been mentioned... due a complete lack of cash.

Im not in a position to help him in that respect as Im friend of friend... I said I could help advise onto the next step once he was bored using:

http://www.w3schools.com/

He just picked those languages as something to do and is now getting into them and wants to know more, so rather than just doing it himself he asked for my help to assist...

[james_gt3rs]

I think it would be very hard to get a developer job with no experience, and that's a catch 22 anyway. There's thousands of students that graduate every year and snap up entry level jobs.

Someone I know worked in Support for years, then got an MSc in Software engineering and then a developer job.

[Du1point8]

james_gt3rs said:

I think it would be very hard to get a developer job with no experience, and that's a catch 22 anyway. There's thousands of students that graduate every year and snap up entry level jobs.

Someone I know worked in Support for years, then got an MSc in Software engineering and then a developer job.

At the moment Im just helping the tech stack... Im not advising on jobs etc... I just want to see what his goal is and what he likes to do.

He already asked what I do and Im didnt really tell him as he might get put off I have been pimping myself out for the best part of 13 years and still dont know it all.

Plus I didnt want to say calc engines/messaging systems/trading platforms/etc... when at the moment he just wants to know how to tie things in with more robust CSS and HTML and the stuff I do would make learning progamming look daunting.

If he likes web development and seeing what he does, I was thinking of getting him into JS/Jquery next.

[Accelebrate]

I'm guessing this shouldn't be in Jobs/Employment!

I would install something like Bitnami next and learn some basic PHP/SQL:

http://bitnami.com/stack/wamp