Coding/Computer Networking school

[TheKey]

Can anyone recommend me a (free) place to learn to code and to learn some computer networking?

Backstory: Ive recently gotten into bitcoin, litecoin and Ethereum mining and have realised that I am far behind the 8-ball with no coding or programming skills to speak of. Id like to learn how to program bots to mine and how to set up virtual machines to help out...

 

[Reality]

I never got into bitcoin mining myself because the market price is driven completely by speculation. There is no real value in most crypto currencies as it could easily disappear at any moment. In fact, I believe most of the huge price increase for bitcoins has been driven by a lot of large bitcoin investors helping to drive up the price. Because there is no oversight, no government control, etc. may seem appealing to buyers, but currency investors are at high risk of immediate and unpredictable losses due to currency devaluations.

This is even more volatile than the DOT-COM industry was prior to its 2000 crash. For example, when one bitcoin exchange lost all of its currency either through hacking or embezzlement by the owners, bitcoin prices nosedived. All it will probably take is two or three major bitcoin investors to cash out for whatever reason and an avalanche could start out of fear. Once that stampede to sell starts, it could get really bad really fast. Ironically, if organized crime gets involved, their involvement could help keep the price from bottoming out, but there will always be other risks for crypto currencies.

As for mining, from my understanding, the only way to make real money (meaning a lot of money) from crypto mining is to create mining farms. A few computers are going to consume so much electrical power that it the operation costs will likely offset any money you generate. Again, I'm not an expert, but I have spent considerable time reading and staying on top of bitcoins for a while. I am less familiar with Ethereum, but with it, there is at least an underlying value in the form of processing resources so maybe it has a brighter future.

Anyway, to answer your question, I would try Youtube if you haven't. There are a lot of great guides there on a variety of programming languages and purposes.

 

[JoeyBoy718]

You can also take free classes and cheap specializations (you can get it for free by taking each class individually) on Coursera and Udacity. Coursera is basically classes from the top universities in the world. It's either the same exact class offered at those schools or a modified version. Udacity is classes custom designed by people at the major companies in industry. As you would expect, Coursera tends to be more theoretical while Udacity tends to be more hands on. Also a good reference site is Tutorialspoint. It has tutorials on everything from languages to libraries and frameworks. It also has interactive developer environments (IDEs) in dozens of different languages so that you can practice writing code instantly without installing and setting up everything.

 

[TheKey]

Thanks for the tips guys!

 

[Seven]

Uhhhh.....I got nothing. But if you're into molecular analytics and nano contamination. I'm your guy.

 

[TheKey]

I never got into bitcoin mining myself because the market price is driven completely by speculation. There is no real value in most crypto currencies as it could easily disappear at any moment. In fact, I believe most of the huge price increase for bitcoins has been driven by a lot of large bitcoin investors helping to drive up the price. Because there is no oversight, no government control, etc. may seem appealing to buyers, but currency investors are at high risk of immediate and unpredictable losses due to currency devaluations.

This is even more volatile than the DOT-COM industry was prior to its 2000 crash. For example, when one bitcoin exchange lost all of its currency either through hacking or embezzlement by the owners, bitcoin prices nosedived. All it will probably take is two or three major bitcoin investors to cash out for whatever reason and an avalanche could start out of fear. Once that stampede to sell starts, it could get really bad really fast. Ironically, if organized crime gets involved, their involvement could help keep the price from bottoming out, but there will always be other risks for crypto currencies.

As for mining, from my understanding, the only way to make real money (meaning a lot of money) from crypto mining is to create mining farms. A few computers are going to consume so much electrical power that it the operation costs will likely offset any money you generate. Again, I'm not an expert, but I have spent considerable time reading and staying on top of bitcoins for a while. I am less familiar with Ethereum, but with it, there is at least an underlying value in the form of processing resources so maybe it has a brighter future.

Anyway, to answer your question, I would try Youtube if you haven't. There are a lot of great guides there on a variety of programming languages and purposes.

I can see your point, Reality, but I think the scarcity of the coins and their anonymity give them some intrinsic value. Those are fairly unique things in a currency today.

 

[CyberB0b]

Bitcoin mining becomes less and less profitable every day, that's why the value goes up.

MIT has free coding courses, but for me, unless I fully commit to something, I'm less likely to take it seriously and finish it. I'd recommend a 6-12 week boot camp.

 

[JoeyBoy718]

Bitcoin mining becomes less and less profitable every day, that's why the value goes up.

MIT has free coding courses, but for me, unless I fully commit to something, I'm less likely to take it seriously and finish it. I'd recommend a 6-12 week boot camp.

From what I've seen, most coding camps tend to be geared toward making you a full-stack JavaScript developer as fast as possible. So it's typically NodeJS on the back-end, ReactJS on the front-end, a basic coding tutorial and basic HTML/CSS. I don't think it goes into the things you'd generally learn in a computer science degree that lots of companies require you to know, like working with different data structures and understanding their space and run-time complexities. I guess it depends on what you want to do.

 

[Meat-O-Rama]

I never got into bitcoin mining myself because the market price is driven completely by speculation. There is no real value in most crypto currencies as it could easily disappear at any moment. In fact, I believe most of the huge price increase for bitcoins has been driven by a lot of large bitcoin investors helping to drive up the price. Because there is no oversight, no government control, etc. may seem appealing to buyers, but currency investors are at high risk of immediate and unpredictable losses due to currency devaluations.

This is even more volatile than the DOT-COM industry was prior to its 2000 crash. For example, when one bitcoin exchange lost all of its currency either through hacking or embezzlement by the owners, bitcoin prices nosedived. All it will probably take is two or three major bitcoin investors to cash out for whatever reason and an avalanche could start out of fear. Once that stampede to sell starts, it could get really bad really fast. Ironically, if organized crime gets involved, their involvement could help keep the price from bottoming out, but there will always be other risks for crypto currencies.

As for mining, from my understanding, the only way to make real money (meaning a lot of money) from crypto mining is to create mining farms. A few computers are going to consume so much electrical power that it the operation costs will likely offset any money you generate. Again, I'm not an expert, but I have spent considerable time reading and staying on top of bitcoins for a while. I am less familiar with Ethereum, but with it, there is at least an underlying value in the form of processing resources so maybe it has a brighter future.

Anyway, to answer your question, I would try Youtube if you haven't. There are a lot of great guides there on a variety of programming languages and purposes.

You just described the US Dollar. It's not backed by anything other than it's perceived value, and it's manipulated on a daily basis by those interested in seeing it's value increase.

As far as learning to code, both Codecademy and Code School offer interactive lessons in a variety of languages and frameworks. Coursera offers courses in a wide variety of topics, including networking, programming, virtualization etc. Each of these has various free and paid versions of their content. Khan Academy has a wide variety of topics as well, most (or all?) of which are free.

If you are looking to orchestrate fleets of VMs to do your bidding, I would suggest looking into orchestration tools such as Chef, Puppet or Ansible. These tools have solved most if not all of the "How" for you, you just need to learn how to tell them "What" you want to do and "Where".

As far as mining itself goes, as Reality said, good luck with that. The computing power necessary to do the mining has grown far beyond what any individual is likely to have access to, and the additional associated electrical and cooling costs are going to eat if not greatly exceed any profits. Your best bet is to either get in early on a new virtual currency or currencies (highly speculative) or find a service or goods you can deliver to a marketplace where people will readily pay in said virtual currencies.

On the bright side, if you do get it figured out, you could end up like This Guy.

 

[Reality]

You just described the US Dollar. It's not backed by anything other than it's perceived value, and it's manipulated on a daily basis by those interested in seeing it's value increase.

There are two main and very important differences between the US Dollar and bitcoins. First, the US Dollar established itself as a physical currency first. While it has been making its transition toward digital currency, it has had a very long time to establish and stabilize itself before ever becoming a digital currency and even now, it's still half-in and half-out as a physical-vs-digital currency.

The second difference, and by far the most important, is there is government oversight, and even more important, protection systems for the US Dollar. Bitcoins are pure speculation valuations with no assets or non-digital value, and no oversight or protections. While the major bitcoin exchanges could stop trading to help fend off a mass selling spree driving down the value of bitcoins, a lot of traders use digital wallets instead.

That's why countries maintain their own currencies because it gives them control and protection over their primary currencies valuation. There are a variety of items used as currencies such as gold, silver, etc. but those are asset-based currencies that provide a tangible value beyond speculation. Sure, speculation can alter their perceived value but there is still an asset there that helps justify those valuations.

I think the future of crypto currency is promising and bitcoins, more so than any other crypto currency, have helped bring awareness and validation of crypto currencies to many people including the average person. I just think that bitcoins and many of the other current crypto currencies are too volatile right now because they have very few, if any, protections in place and are and will continue to be highly susceptible to fear-based sell-offs that could be triggered at any moment by a massive sell-off or cash out by as few as one or two large bitcoin investors, even if their motivation has nothing to do with bitcoins itself.

 

[TheKey]

There are two main and very important differences between the US Dollar and bitcoins. First, the US Dollar established itself as a physical currency first. While it has been making its transition toward digital currency, it has had a very long time to establish and stabilize itself before ever becoming a digital currency and even now, it's still half-in and half-out as a physical-vs-digital currency.

The second difference, and by far the most important, is there is government oversight, and even more important, protection systems for the US Dollar. Bitcoins are pure speculation valuations with no assets or non-digital value, and no oversight or protections. While the major bitcoin exchanges could stop trading to help fend off a mass selling spree driving down the value of bitcoins, a lot of traders use digital wallets instead.

That's why countries maintain their own currencies because it gives them control and protection over their primary currencies valuation. There are a variety of items used as currencies such as gold, silver, etc. but those are asset-based currencies that provide a tangible value beyond speculation. Sure, speculation can alter their perceived value but there is still an asset there that helps justify those valuations.

I think the future of crypto currency is promising and bitcoins, more so than any other crypto currency, have helped bring awareness and validation of crypto currencies to many people including the average person. I just think that bitcoins and many of the other current crypto currencies are too volatile right now because they have very few, if any, protections in place and are and will continue to be highly susceptible to fear-based sell-offs that could be triggered at any moment by a massive sell-off or cash out by as few as one or two large bitcoin investors, even if their motivation has nothing to do with bitcoins itself.

I disageee that the dollar is backed by anything other than our belief that it is worth something. It's being printed daily and has almost no reserves behind it. Most of the cryptos have a limited supply that cannot be manipulated or printed by any one person or group, and that gives it some value against a fiat like the dollar. It behaved like gold when North Korea sent their latest missle out, which was encouraging.