What steps should I take to learn programming?

Hello,

It pretty much depends on what you are interested in pursuing. If you want to go into a career in web development, as you hinted at, then the .NET languages are probably a great place to start. PHP is also good but Microsoft's ASP is taking up most of the market now.

No matter where you want to go I think that Visual Basic .NET is probably the best programming language to begin first. It is extremely wordy which makes the transition from psuedocode to real code extremely easy. Some of the old school folks will recommend diving right into c++ but I feel that it is a bit too challenging for a beginner. But definitely pick up an Object-Oriented language, scripting languages won't get you very far as a programmer.

Another thing that is usually best when starting to learn programming is to have formal instruction so you can avoid falling into bad programming practices. Check with a local university and see if they offer any night classes. I also teach introduction to programming online every now and then - if you are interested shoot me an email through my profile.

Later on when you have a good programming foundation you'll need to learn SQL because applications and websites are useless if they can't talk to a database.

Good Luck!

Okay so you are familiar with a GNU/Linux environment. What about UNIX? If you can get your family's support I would GENUINELY go down to the nearest school (State school or continuing ed program is fine) and talk to their CS faculty about classes. It helps (A LOT) to be familiar with math through trigonometry, and studies show repeatedly the more math you take the more you make ultimately. One class to take is UNIX. If it doesn't start out to be terribly familiar then you DON'T know about GNU/Linux. They will cover issues like shell scripting usually in the bourne shell or bash, use of sed (the stream editor) and piping, and grep. All of these should make your life very comfortable in GNU/Linux. Learning them on your own is like what the great cartoonist/colorist Marie Severin said about her not going to art school: "It took me ten years to learn what my brother John learned in four."

If you are familiar with Ubuntu, and that is what you mean, then immediately boot it up with web access and type "sudo apt-get install build-essential" in a terminal window. Ubuntu is one of the few Linux environments which does not come with the development packages installed by default.

SQL I would definitely hold off on. Webmonkey's javascript tutorials are nice (but HARD sometimes) however really, python is a really great choice for the next step. A simple interpreted language like that or perl can help you to begin to understand the difference between what a computer does and what we like to think it does. For example computers don't know the difference between doc files and jpg files and pdf files. We and our programmers like to pretend they do. Generally they get a request for any data file like that and they will go down a list of applications and what they handle, and if they don't handle that one then they return an application not found message. It might be a big deal for us but not for our computers -- they've already done what was appropriate.

There is really a lot to learn and obviously you can hear what my bias is. In this case -- the money may not be there but it's worth the investment.

And work hard on your math.

It seems to me that you are in good feet to start learning programming. If I were you, I would start first with python. It'll give you good customs on how to write decent code and since it is so easy. It will help you to accomplish a lot of things and keep you motivated.

From then on you should try to learn things progressively. Python is fairly easy and after learning it you should try a low level programming language. Like C or C++, so you can learn more about memory and how to deal with a very demanding syntax.

Everything is progressive in programming. That's why I suggest you to start with the easy things and then go on to the not so easy but still interesting things.

C++ to me is a very easy language to learn, i got the hang of it in a about a couple days and i really dont spend a whole lot of time around a computer. I say start with C++

Since you already have some background on HTML/CSS, i would say PHP+MySQL is the next step for you to get your hand dirtier.

Or, if you want to try abit of desktop programming which is quite differnet than what you have been doing, try C Programming Language.

A natural extension to what you've already done is to use PHP to create dynamic websites. You can set up a linux box with apache and php to get started. A great benefit to PHP is the great documentation at http://www.php.net/

If you really want to get serious, learn C/C++ and Java. But for your next step, I would try to tackle PHP.

Search on Net

you should start with C/C++