If you are looking for a lucrative job it is hard to argue with IT right now. Programming jobs are amongst the best paid and I think this trend will continue in the future. I am going to make a quick guide on how you could make your first steps in this field.
The two main paths of being a developer these days is front-end and back-end. Front-end deals with what you can see with your eyes when you enter a website, while back-end focuses on what happens at the server. Since I am a front-end developer myself, this is what I am going to focus on in this guide.
What you need?
Patience - It takes a lot of time to learn coding, you will often hit a dead end and find problems that you can't solve. What you must be able to do is to be persistant at learning and not give up easily.
English - It is very hard to do without fluent english in programming. All documentation and tutorials is generally speaking in english. It doesn't have to be perfect, but if you can barely use it then it will be way tougher to learn and improve.
Motivation - Yes. You will need a lot of it everyday. Front-end is considered easier to learn but it will not come easily at first.
What you don't need?
IT background - It is nice in a sense that it can make you better understand processes that occur in your PC and in the beginning of your programming journey it is easier to find your first job but besides that it doesn't do very much.
Advanced math - You won't deal with any heavy math when making websites. There are fields in programming where math is important but you can be a great webdeveloper with only very basic understanding of math.
A little bit more pro's.
You can make a lot of money with it. Especially in western countries or if you are willing to relocate, it is also incredibly easy to switch countries and live where you want. Most countries need programmers and as long as you know English it is not problematic to travel around. It is constant development also and if you stick with it you can eventually become a part of a big project/technology that you believe in. I think that in general, programmers contribute a lot to the society.
Also for all the crypto guys reading this, programming will make you understand better technologies behind your favourite cryptos;)
Ok so how do I start and what technologies I need?
You should start with some free HTML course. For example www.codeacademy.com has one, but you will find plenty of course like that in the web. It doesn't matter much which one you choose as long as you go through it, make excercises. Definitely don't only listen as you will not learn enough this way. You must put everything that you learn immediately to practice.
To start coding you will need an IDE. It means a program to write in it, although you can do it even in a notepad it is recommended to get an actual IDE as it makes writing code easier. Most of those programmes are free and I will recommend either atom or brackets.
If you have any questions post below. There is going to be a second part in which I am going to go over the most important technologies for front-end and in what order you should learn them and also other skills that are usefull to know to become a coder.
Now, this all takes a lot of time and it will not happen overnight. But you can do it all at home, and maybe if you want to change your life for the better a little bit, then programming is for you.
The problem I have with front-end development and especially with the current trend of using front-end technologies in the back-end (e.g. javascript and node) is the lack of a good IDE and debugging tools. Atom is more of a text editor (though a good one) than an IDE (I'm not familiar with brackets). For examples of good IDE's look at Visual Studio, Xcode, Eclipse, etc. but again, these are more for the back end.
As you mentioned in your post, I think motivation is probably the most important, its not so hard to learn any language, but you have to learn and practice 3-4-5 hours daily to gather a "sellable" knowledge.
@shslr
Nice Job!
Keep the good work up!
Thanks for sharing