How do I teach myself how to Program?

There aren鈥檛 any opportunities for me to get taught how to program, but I鈥檝e wanted to learn for over 10 years. I鈥檓 tired of waiting for someone to teach me, so I want to teach myself. I have decent HTML experience and want to step it up to Programming applications. I鈥檝e tried books, programs, CDs, the works; none worked for me. Every book/tutorial exercise would hand me a sheet of code, tell me to copy it, and not explained what any of it friggin鈥?meant or why it works. I need to learn how to read and understand code and learn to manipulate it explained in easy-to-understand, plain English. Any FREE online sources, e-books, websites, documents, tutorials, faqs, instructional programs, etc. that could be linked, I鈥檇 REALLY appreciate it.

I have Microsoft Visual Studio.net Version 2003 (Academic Version). The program's tutorials are the same way as any other.

If you are starting out and you want to learn a useful language, may I strongly suggest Python. It is free, very powerful, very easy to learn, and has a growing and dedicated user base. It is also cross platform, so code written for Windows will usually run with no issues on Unix and Mac.

C and C++ would be good languages to learn next. They are more difficult, but you will learn more about the machine level goings-on in your programs. Python will give you a pretty good background to help you get started. If you program on Unix or Linux, you will find that Python and C/C++ have very similar libraries and some system calls are even identical.

For python, you will need a good text editor. Notepad just doesn't cut it. I personally use Emacs and I love it, but you should experiment. Get a text editor for programmers. Word, WordPad, etc. are not suitable.

You do not need to go out and buy an expensive IDE (integrated development environment), especially if you are starting out. Python comes with an interactive shell (either Eric and/or Idle) and they can act a little like an IDE.

I personally find that your best bet is to use a text editor and a DOS prompt.

Python has a pretty good tutorial to help get you started. Ask on python programmer forums or newsgroups for advice for good books for learners and to help answer questions. Python will help you learn the basics of programming and give you a pretty good understanding about how to program and why programs are structured the way that they are.

Here are some links to get you started. To post on the newsgroups, you either need to have a newsreader account through your isp, or you can get a gmail account. If you have a question and want to ask it on a forum or newsgroup, be sure to do some research and search the archives for your question first.

Good luck!

Try here
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http://w3schools.com/

EDIT: Since most tutorials, like Micro$ofts offerings, are pretty obtuse you should start with something really simple like QBASIC which may be part of your o/s.
QBASIC can help you to understand program flow, functions, subroutines, etc.
If you don't have it, it can be d/l since it is now free.

or instead of what the last guy said, you could try http://www.holtsoft.com/

Depends what type of applications or what type of websites you want to make. There's a whole bunch to choose from, but if you are into visual basic, remember the programs usually only work for windows and not any other OS.

Get your hands on a development environment such as NetBeans (Java) or Visual Studio (.Net), load up a sample project, and play with it, change values here and there, hit F1 when appropriate, and find sample code online... that's how I learned.

If you really want to start out with something simple and don't mind if all your programs are useless, locate and download QuickBASIC... there are plenty of tutorials and samples online for it, and it's a great introduction to programming.

But to be fair, once you begin, it will probably still be years before you're capable of producing code that's worthwhile to the world at large. Also, it's possible you won't be able to pick it up at all... not everyone's brain works well in programmer mode ;) But don't let me discourage you in the least.

Good luck, and, most of all, have fun :)