Ask HN: What to tell someone who wants to self learn and be a coder?

I was at Barnes and Noble (a book store in the US) yesterday at the information desk waiting where I saw someone ask the clerk about coding. She wanted to know whether she should buy the ‘javascript for dummies book’ or the ‘java for dummies book’. I slightly introduced myself into the conversation telling her I was a coder and if there were any questions I could help her with.

She works at an IT company as an executive assistant, and wanted to do some self-learning of coding. It seems like her aspirations were to move into more programming as she talked with the programmers at the company and knew a little bit about the different technologies such as C#, databases, etc.

Point blankly, she asked me where she should start. When answering the questions, I tried to distill my answer in the lens of going through my university computer science courses and stumbled upon finally settling upon learning HTML/CSS first, then moving on to javascript. I then mentioned the difference between front end and back end technologies. From there she could choose the next technology.

I also mentioned she should go search around the hacker news forums, as I didn’t have any great books or sites I could recommend on top of my head for new coders. When leaving Barnes and Noble, one of the main problems I saw was she was completely overwhelmed on where to start. With that, here are some of my thoughts, and maybe some others could chime in.

1) Software architecture

When learning how to code, you often first look at the trees, and then later zoom out to see the forest, and then the world. In retrospect, I think it is easier if high level architecture is explained to new coders. For example:

a) Front end vs back end coding This can first establish the delineation of different types of coding

b) MVC Talk about pretty much the foundation of all workflows (I know there are some alterations, but imo everything more or less follows this)

c) HTML/CSS Overview

d) What is javascript

e) Overview of a database

f) Then diving into back end coding

thoughts?