The road to become a programmer

[JamesWMH88]

I'm looking for a 'career' change, I don't actually have a career at the moment since I haven't been able to find a job since I graduated with a degree in Materials Engineering. One of my loves has always been computers and programming, though I have never studied it seriously.

When I was 11 I wrote a very basic graphical 'game' using notepad and HTML, where I drew each possible position of the main character on the different 'maze' level in MSPaint, using pictures of arrows as links to a new page with the character in a new position, and various other buttons would pop up 'search box', 'press button' etc. At the time I thought this was an amazing achievement of my programming skills.

I've used a little bit of FORTRAN 90 whilst I was at university, which rekindled my interest in programming. When I was a kid I mainly used C and HTML, but only very basically as my 'game' suggests.

I want to learn a new programming language, I'm not entirely sure where I want to go with it, but the number one contender at the moment is android apps.

I'm looking at learning Java, but I've read that it's a difficult place to begin with; so I've also looked at learning Visual Basic, which I believe is also object oriented(?) but a little easier to understand? (not that I know what an object is anyway).

Any information people could give me regarding which language to learn, and if there are any good online tutorial for that language I'd really appreciate it. Some of the tutorials I've used so far are full or jargon I can't understand.

Also, I'm not afraid of maths having got an engineering degree.

Thanks in advance for any help/advice.

James

 

[JamesWMH88]

Thanks everyone for the advice.

I think I'd like to learn a language that has a more 'normal' structure, so that I can apply what I've learnt to other languages, I'd rather not start with one that's completely alien to most other, if that makes any sense?

 

[JamesWMH88]

Hi everyone,

I did try C# a few weeks ago, and everything was using a layout type view to create windows forms. I hardly did any coding just putting values into boxes, and after a couple of week of this I felt I didn't know any of the language. Perhaps it was just a bad tutorial I used, or a tutorial focused too much on a certain thing.

So that's why I've been thinking about Java, can anyone recommend any good online tutorials?

And also what do people think my chances of actually gaining employment through the self-taught route are? Feel free to be brutally honest.

Thanks for your help so far everyone.