Are you ever too old to learn to program?

I would start with a procedural language first as jumping right into object oriented programming can be confusing if you are new to programming. Then after you get a feel for programming you can move on to a object oriented language.

A good place to start imo would be plain C with the book C Primer Plus (prata) and you can also watch the free comp sci lectures on youtube that use C.

http://www.youtube.com/user/UNSWelearning#p/c/6B940F08B9773B9F/0/hE7l6Adoiiw
 
I'm doing a degree in software engineering at the moment, and personally I hate books. Following page after page of someone elses book just leads me to sit and type out the code to get the end result.

I find the best way to learn (atleast to start with) is to go over a few basic tutorials ofcourse, but then decide on a simple program that you would like to make. Don't worry about interfaces or anything, just a simple form with labels and buttons will do. By doing this you'll come across many problems but because you actually know what you want to achieve you'll pay attention to solutions. Do a google search for your problem, or by all means look for the solution in a book, but don't just follow a book cover to cover.

You might for example want to grab the text from a textbox when you press a button and display a message box to the user. You'll think "how the bloody hell to I get that text?". You'll start googling, look through a few answers and once you've got it working you'll think "sweet!". You won't need to research that again. Once you've done it once you'll know forever. The only thing that changes between languages is the syntax (generally).

I'd recommend Java or c# as a starting language. Yes they're object-oriented languages but the basic concept really isn't hard to grasp, and you can learn a lot of the basics without looking at anything related to objects. Some people love Java, some love C/C++, it's really up to you. If you decided to do Java or C# I'd be more than willing to help you with things you may get stuck on over skype text chat. If you choose the C/C++ route to begin with then maybe not...I'm not a huge fan of these two :P

I have university lectures and tutorials for C, C++, Java, introduction to Java, Object Oriented Programming, Further Object Oriented Programming, C# and a few more advanced ones like concurrency and some for the other side of programming (the design phases etc). If you kept them to yourself I'd be happy to give you a copy.
 
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Surprised we've not got an area for our own tutorials tbh!

Lots of knowledge here. I think they did start classes once to teach people, but it from basic lessons, to developing a game to being dead in about 1 month :(
 
WTF are you babbling about? is this even English??

Are you stupid? it's quite evident what I am talking about!

Here, in retard for you:

With the knowledge we have in this forum I am surprised that we don't have a section on tutorials on programming in different languages!

There was a thread started a while ago now who's aim it was to teach programming. They finally decided on Java and it was going to cover the basics, however, in the space of a month it went from basic tutorials, to creating some sort of racing game to completely dying.
 
Surprised we've not got an area for our own tutorials tbh!

Lots of knowledge here. I think they did start classes once to teach people, but it from basic lessons, to developing a game to being dead in about 1 month :(

WTF are you babbling about? is this even English??

Are you stupid? it's quite evident what I am talking about!

All that caused by what seems to be a single word missing lol:
Lots of knowledge here. I think they did start classes once to teach people, but it went from basic lessons, to developing a game to being dead in about 1 month
 
Are you stupid? it's quite evident what I am talking about!

Here, in retard for you:

With the knowledge we have in this forum I am surprised that we don't have a section on tutorials on programming in different languages!

There was a thread started a while ago now who's aim it was to teach programming. They finally decided on Java and it was going to cover the basics, however, in the space of a month it went from basic tutorials, to creating some sort of racing game to completely dying.

"in retard, for me" - nice

if you'd have stated what you were talking about in plain understandable English instead of a disjointed combination of words with horrific grammar then we wouldn't have an issue here, would we?
 
I would say no, you're never too old to learn it. My father recently took up PIC programming (sort of assembly code for pic processors) and he is 50+.
 
I think when people stop learning in life/business/whatever .. that's when everything crashes down and life becomes the same every day. And people say 'I've just got to get through it' or 'I'm just plodding on'.

Take an interest and go for it!
 
Programming can be both fun and frustrating. Although less of the later nowadays with the multitude of online tutorials, languages and forums to help you out.

And yes, there is no age to starting programming. Programming is actually a good mental exercise, so really, it should be recommended as you get older to keep the old nugget going.

Another site I troll is Gamedev.net, although it is more specifically about video game programming, which is always a fun way to go about learning coding.

Take your time and have fun!

As for language recommendation, I'm a big fan of C# (and C++ of course, but it can be a bit hardcore for starters). HTML5 is getting some traction as well. Check out Lemmings HTML5 + javascript :)
 
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Never too old to learn to program.
Picking a language to learn might be difficult to do. It will depend on what you want to do with it.
I'm quite a fan of scripting languages personally. So much can be done in Perl for example, and so much out there ready to be reused and learned from. You can create a GUI app with PerlTK. Want to manipulate spreadsheets? Easy peasy also.It's losing popularity now I think but Ruby is another interesting scripting language and totally OO.
 
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