I want to learn how to program

I know nothing about programming (well, I know a little). I want to learn. What are the best sites I can use that are free and can teach me?

What I want to do:

I want to create my own web browser and add functions to it. I want to be able to make software. What should I start with. Thanks.

If there are no free sites that teaches, you can link me to paid sites as well. I just don't want to spend 50k or more on schooling which I already have and wish I didn't :/

There is no reason why you should pay to learn how to program.
This website is a good start to read some books about your prefered language
http://it-ebooks.info/

I started on codecademy.

Then took an open courseware course at Harvard with EdX.com (it was really hard - I can see now why Harvard is for super smart people).

Now I'm going to College (about 8 years too late).

My advice is to learn as much as you can for free, that way if you decide to "bow out" then you won't lose any money.

Good luck and someday you will look at this post and laugh at this awesomely geeky joke...

yensidtlaw said:

Good luck and someday you will look at this post and laugh at this awesomely geeky joke...

Click to expand...

Only if that worked on the notebook

w3schools
This website is good to learn a lot of programming languages ​​such as:
php , css, html, javascript, sql ....


Good luck

+thanks everyone post.

@bk071 "I will not throw paper airplanes in class" Once I learn the language, I'll check that joke again xD

I signed up to Codeacademy yesterday and it looks good, would recommend that. Udacity is also a good site to look at. A lot of people recommend W3 Schools but I hate how the tutorials are laid out, there is a lot of text (don't know if that changes throughout as I only went through a couple pages).

Treehouse is pretty good also but you have to pay.

grab a book, read it. And code away. Many of the programming books will guide you trough the hello world project.

To start with, you need to learn the basic programming practices that pretty much all languages share. Variables, functions, structures etc.
Then once you have the basics covered, you can start narrowing down the choices for languages and environments. Some people prefer creating server side stuff while others like creating desktop apps that run on clients' computers. So its a matter of what you want to do.

Creating a web browser from scratch would require knowledge of network protocols and how data is transmitted/received over the web, JS, HTML, CSS. Then something like C++ to actually CREATE the program.

Friendly tip 1:
If you know very little about programming then it might be a good idea to start with a few small projects and gradually move up the ladder. Creating a browser is not an easy task and you might end up being exhausted and giving up on it all just because you don't see things moving in the right direction.

Friendly tip 2:
Programming itself is not that hard to learn. You can read a couple of books and call yourself a "programmer" but in reality you'll be capable of nothing.
Thinking like a programmer is what distinguishes pros from 100,000 newbies (who call themselves programmers). Pros have this attitude of a programmer, they look at problems from a systematic perspective and solve them algorithmically.
And this is something most of the books and schools don't (can't) teach you. This can not be instilled into a person just like that... The only way to achieve this is practice like crazy and surround yourself with people who are already doing it. If you're surrounded by a bunch of noobs, they'll drag you to their level.

Good luck.