Thanks for the reply. Do you have any resources you can recommend where I can learn more about programming in general? There seem to be a lot of things that people talk about that just go completely over my head.
Last is Simply Rails 2 which is one big long Rails tutorial and will take you through the process of building a Rails app (it took me about two weekends to work through and has given me rudimentary understand of Rails) http://www.amazon.com/Simply-Rails-2-Patrick-Lenz/dp/0980455...
In addition, as other people have recommended you should try small programming exercises when you have a chance. For further brain teasers, I recommend working through the exercises in http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/
Well there's a specific lesson plan that I think is geared towards your business goals. I'm not sure what your time constraints are like but if you spend some uninterrupted time with these books you should be able to tackle them no problem.
Anyhow, good luck, I hope you find the time amongst everything else to dive into this material.
PS Programming is a lifelong project, give it time.
Keep in mind that this will continue to be the case for a while. Sometimes you have to worry less about understanding what's happening to start off with, don't let not knowing how to do something stop you from doing it. Sometimes it all becomes clear once you see how things are used.
One thing I would suggest, it really provided the "aha" moment for me, is finding something that will dump out or print our your datastructures. If you don't understand what a hash is, and there's a tool in language (x) that will spew out what's in there, you will probably very quickly "get" what it is.
It really helps to have people to whom you can direct questions as you learn.
Do you have any friends that are developers? People generally enjoy when someone takes a genuine interest in their field. Perhaps ask politely if any of them would mind occasional IMs as you work your way through things.
Actually, no...unfortunately. I think while I am at the Hacker dojo, I'll make some more friends as I'm here. But that's a great idea, I just hope to make some friends that will tolerate questions that are rather basic..
The ruby koans do a pretty good job giving you a quick overview of programming concepts in ruby. If you have any trouble getting up and running feel free to send me an email ihumanable at gmail dot com
