Spec me a good beginners programming book/course ...

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I've dabbled with programming before, I have made a website in HTML, but its not that advanced (no javascript or anything just text and images and some CSS for aligning and stuff.

I tried to learn python but I never really got anywhere with it. I have also looked at C++ (work experience day so not that much knowledge of it) and Scheme, which I have the MIT textbook for on a flash drive somewhere.

Anyone got any suggestions for a language and/or book/course (preferably free online or something I could possibly borrow from the library) I could look at?

Thanks
AL

 

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Depends on what you want to do. If you want to develop desktop applications try something like Java, C# or Python.

I don't do much web development but know a bit of PHP, that wasn't too difficult to learn.

I'm not really sure what type of developing I would be interested in, probably desktop but maybe with some web capabilities (something that could do web scraping or crawling prehaps)

I looked at Scheme over the weekend and I thought the MIT book was really good however the language is a bit impractical as far as I can see for anything other than learning with?

 

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Python would be a good choice.

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/

Thanks I think I have settled on either Java, C / C++ or Python.

Would there be any reason to choose one over the others or just start on one of them?