Programming Advice.

I personally recommend the Murach books, is what I did when I was getting into it.
Found the books super easy to follow. They take ages to get though, but honestly I think if peeps don't want to put the time in their linkely never going far with it anyways.
 
I would highly advice you take a keen interest in Maths, and anything to do with logic.

Second.... learn to be flexible. Don't aim for one language, your value as a developer/programmer is in being able to look at a problem and find the best way (given many constraints) of achieving that goal. I had to force myself to learn something recently because it was the best solution for the task. I have tried to stay away from full stack development, but now I find myself needing to in order to be more adaptable.

A degree gets your foot in the door. You have to be creative, and engaged and always eager.

If there was one piece of advice I could give, no matter what you do, learn to take criticism of your work, or approach. As a programmer/developer you will take a lot of it unless you are in the top 5% of smart as hell guys.

Unless this is something you realllly want to do, I am gonna advice instead of going into finance, medical field or legal in order to make money. (possibly business management).
 
As much as I dislike it personally, I'd suggest learning JavaScript first and foremost. It's somewhat constrained to the world of browsers and server applications, but that's no bad thing.

JavaScript is a language that can get you something for your efforts with a very quick turnaround, whether you develop a web page or a server application. It has more tutorials, guides, and libraries than you could ever hope to fully explore, and is the world's #1 language as of the recent 2019 Stack Overflow survey.

Learn to make a web page, then learn to glue it to a server - I'm sure there are a bunch of tutorials for this. Once you understand the concepts involved you can progress to the other big languages like Python, Java, etc. At that point you can consider more complicated projects like games, which will expand your knowledge to all the fun stuff about computers. Good luck!
 
Depending on your interests and how you learn, it might be worth looking at something like Processing that makes it very simple to get started and produce visual feedback.

My first programming experience was getting a turtle to draw stuff using LOGO which got me hooked. Many intros to languages just manipulate text - not very inspiring when you start out.
 
The issue is that every problem (and thinking behind the problem and the language itself) need to fit.

Here’s my road..

Primary school - BBC Basic
Secondary School - 6502 assembler (bbc)
Secondary School - ARM basic / ARM RISC assembler (ASM)
Degree y1 - ARM C, ARM ASM, Borland Turbo Pascal. Unix, Z
Degree y2 - ARM ASM, 68000 embedded, unix and x windows, C, Z
Degree y3 (industry) - ARM ASM, C and Solaris unix, RACF (mainframe)
Degree y4 - ARM ASM, C/C++, fortran77, Cobol, Z guarded command language and ADA. Xwindows and html (cutting edge at the time), Postgres SQL.

Work 1997 - C, Asn.1 acc, gnu c, c++, oracle sqlplus, pro-C/C++, mainly C
Work 2002ish - Java
Work 2006 - last coding of java

Since then it’s all been non coding except at home - C/C++/objective-c and embedded Blackfin DSP assembler. Even that has stopped in 2016..

Now it’s diplomacy, politics, argument common sense, cat herding and escalations. Oh and a bit of “doing it the right way”.
 
JasonM said:
Download the Visual Studio IDE below

https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/

Then look at beginning C# YouTube video and take it from there.

i started coding back in 1980 (i'm 45 now), you just have to jump in and start somewhere. It was hard back in 1980 as you only had books that came with the computer, and no one else new anything, our school did not even have a computer teacher back then. It's all changed now with the internet.
Click to expand...

Lots of ideas here but I'd go with this ^ but of course I would say that as my main background is in C#. Visual Studio is an awesome IDE and learning C# also opens the door to Java as they're not vastly different. Visual Studio also support Python too.
Ruby and preferably Python are good alternatives, both scripting languages.
I'm assuming OP is past the age of getting a degree as a young grad. Degree's are good but some of the best developers I've worked with don't have a degree. One bailed out as they felt they weren't learning stuff they didn't already know. It's one of those careers where passion and a talent for it is worth much more than a degree - those passionate about it would be learning it way before starting a degree course.
Depending on age could try to get foot in door as an apprentice, IT trainee etc. Even roles like Testing can open the door to Software Development. Ie, manual testing can lead to test automation which then opens the door to becoming a developer.
Pluralsight I find is very good but don't just watch the video's. Pause and try things out. Once you feel you've learned enough it's time to think of some projects to start.
It's great to learn from others. I've worked with a wide range of people in the past. Some have worked by themselves in a company and you can tell that as they haven't picked up many things peer reviews or simply working close to others would help them to learn.
 
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As I'm sure youre probably getting already, starting somewhere is important.

That can also be a internet course instead of a book. I also second the "start with javascript" idea. It really is simple to start with JS, and that's what's important.
 
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