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Ask HN: Help!! Need to learn to build stuff - within 2 weeks!

9 points by no-go-mojo ↗ HN
Hi,

I'm in a bit of a situation - I need to learn to build stuff (web or mobile apps) in 2 weeks. What can I pick up and be dangerous with, quickly? I have access to a MacBook and a PC, an Android phone and an iPhone - above all I have a blazing fast internet connection and full 80 hours coming up that I can devote to learning.

I used to be a C++ developer, then took a 5 year break from any/all programming. I can still make sense of C++ code and have most of the OOP concepts, but please keep in mind that understanding code and being able to build something are two very different things.

Imagine this, you lose your entire skill-set due to an accident or injury, and need to be able to build something/anything (web or mobile app) by learning something in the coming two weeks or so - what advice would you give yourself? What would you learn, something fast to pick up and make useful stuff with. Please assume you're of average intelligence, not a genius, neither an idiot.

This does not have to be production-grade, just a shaky first go will do.

Thanks in advance!

12 comments

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kingofspain
Try http://www.appcelerator.com/ - you can easily have a basic app up & running with JS in no time. Take a look at the kitchen sink demo and just rip out/adapt the parts you need.
no-go-mojo
This advice is worth it's weight in gold! Gracias amigo!
glimcat
Why this instead of PhoneGap?
kingofspain
PhoneGap wraps everything inside a webview so there is no actual native code. Titanium maps to native elements so you can use real UI elements and in my experience at least (based off an older PhoneGap version admittedly), Titanium apps run much faster and smoother.
bdfh42
If there is a USB driver that allows you to connect your Android phone to your PC/Mac then you could go that way. Java is a C like language and there are masses of tutorials and introductory texts on the web for this platform. I would have thought that someone who has had 5 years programming (at some time in the past) would be able to get something quite presentable up and running well within this time frame.

The Eclipse IDE has an Android "plug-in" that helps out nicely.

abbasmehdi
The OP didn't say they had 5 years of experience, they said its been 5 years since they had any experience.
[dead] losethos
God says...

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justustrees
Why the 2 week time limit? Anyway, you could probably set up a site on Heroku and start building something with Ruby on Rails pretty quickly. It would be a marginal task to connect a jQuery Mobile application to the RoR app on Heroku. I think you should learn jQuery and jQuery Mobile if you want to build a mobile application, then use PhoneGap to build it for both Android and iPhone. The quickest way to start building a nice interface is to use something like jQuery with jQuery UI or jQuery Mobile for mobile apps. Ruby is very popular and there are lots of resources and tutorials available. If you want to build things really fast with less of a learning curve than Ruby, check out ColdFusion. It is proven, stable, fast, compiles to Java, supports OO, has great frameworks, supports full scripting or xml style markup and many other cool things. It's your call, but building in HTML / CSS / JavaScript (using jQuery) will be the quickest way to a front-end, building it with PhoneGap will be the quickest way to Mobile, and doing the backend in a rapid framework with lots of learning resources like Rails or ColdFusion.
no-go-mojo
I started doing this yesterday (RoR), it took me the whole day just setting up on a Windows box - like all of 12 hours yesterday!

Thanks for the detailed explanation, super helpful. I will dive right in.

Why: I sold the idea, too well maybe, and now must deliver.

"Building in HTML / CSS / JavaScript (using jQuery) will be the quickest way to a front-end, building it with PhoneGap will be the quickest way to Mobile, and doing the backend in a rapid framework with lots of learning resources like Rails or ColdFusion." <-- I am getting in here! Wish me luck! :-)

justustrees
Good Luck! If you want, I could help you with some specifics, point you in the right direction, help you troubleshoot a bit if you'd like. Let me know!
no-go-mojo
"Before you start studying jQuery, you should have a basic knowledge of:

HTML CSS JavaScript"

????