Could experienced developers please tell me whether it's realistic to become a productive freelance developer in 3 months of full time study and practice?
The goal would be to good enough to bill $25/30 hour on odesk.com for building a site from scratch to finish (architecture + code + design).
Other than conceptual knowledge from interacting with freelance developers (OO, MVC, ...) I know nothing wrt developing (coding) applications.
Please find below what I plan to learn over the next 3 months:
1. Ruby - Pragprog.com: Learn to program - RubyLearning.com: Core Ruby - Pragprog.com: PickAxe - RubyLearning.com: Ruby Metaprogramming
2. Rails - Railstutorial.org - Pragprog.com: Agile Web Development with Rails - Rails documentation
3. Design - W3Schools: CSS & HTML intro - Pragprog.com: Web design for developers - Pragprog.com: CSS3 & HTML5
4. Credibility - Build own application - Ruby Silver certification
5. On the (freelance) job - Railsmentors.org if I need feedback - Find freelance developer at same rate to subcontract things I can't do efficiently (and learn from the code and the process).
Should this suffice? As you can see I will try to learn the same stuff from different sources - in my experience that's when things stick the most in my mind.
I am also wondering whether I should finish more advanced books (Rails way, Rails recipes, Ruby Quiz, TextMate, Rake, ...) before becoming a freelancer?
Thanks for the feedback!