How did you learn to program?

Honestly, I don't know why so many people recommend thenewboston. If you ask most experienced coders, they are going to advise against his teachings. You need to learn more than just syntax and how to make stuff happen, you need to learn how things actually come to fruition behind the framework.

I recommend learning a basic, easy language to start such as Python. You will get the general idea of programming laws and structure.
A free book/program that I recommend would be "automate the boring stuff".
It is a open book, but you can also purchase it if you'd like to support the author.

I've had ideas and every coder that I've hired let me down and abandoned projects. I've started with Codecademy then went with Codeschool with a project in mind. Learned the basics started learning/using frameworks and took databases courses. Figured out how everything should work in the process. Got a mentor to have someone to talk to about new technologies and best practices in programming which helps a lot if you're stuck on a problem.
I can recommend to everyone to recognize the methods how you can learn most efficiently and learn it in that particular way. But if you want to get better, code everyday a few hours on a particular project, Write webapps with frontend and backend, like a blog with admin and user management, twitter clone using multiple db's, etc. With everything you write you'll get better in solving programming problems and write better and smaller code.

Well you can start with codecademy for the basics and then move on to mini-projects.Really the only way to learn it well is to start some project and learn from making it.You can read hundreds of books and watch thousands of tutorials but in the end you will learn best buy applying your skills to real projects.

How should you learn to code?

All depends on what you want to learn.

A lot of online courses on Udemy, Treehouse, etc, can help you launch an app quickly, but too many people stop there with learning. It is a lot harder to learn about basic computer science principles like algorithms, graphs, sorting, etc. And those things can make a big impact in the quality of software a developer produces. A lot of universities offer online resources that are better and cover those things, in my opinion.

I took a class on it in highschool and said that I can't get into computer engineering because I did bad in that course, and I never wanted to program again.

That's how I learned to program:embarasse

Experimenting and rewriting code examples is a great way to learn programming. After you've learned the basic syntax you may want to read a book or try programming challenges to improve your knowledge. Also, making home projects with no real use can drastically improve programming skills

I was nearly 12. I learned to look up source html codes of web pages. I was replacing the texts on pages whatever I want. Then I learned about basic html coding.

When I was in 15 I had a project which I needed to develop a simple program for my course project in Pascal. I think this is the first time I have ever met with programming. I still remember the tutorials I've read many times.