Ask HN: Zero programming experience and badly want to learn. Where to start?

It teaches like a math book, with practice problems after each lesson.

2. Pick a language to learn. I had a C++ background that I hadn't touched since high school, so I found Ruby a little confusing. But it may also be because of the teaching style of the books I used...

Anyway, I switched to PHP and learned from Larry Ullman's book, PHP 6 and MySQL 5 (http://www.dmcinsights.com/phpmysql3/)

3. Going through both of these will probably take you 2-3 months if you're diligent. But once you're halfway through the second book, I'd say you know enough to start building something and using the PHP book as a reference.

What you'll find is that as you build things, you will learn a lot more about how to make your app come together.

Also, I disagree with the comment that it takes years to be able to do something decent with your newfound programming knowledge. Yes, it will take years before you can talk shop with the best of them, but as someone who has taken several languages (Spanish, Japanese, Latin) and played several instruments (piano, flute), I know it doesn't have take years to get past doing scales.

That's has more to do with ability to learn quickly and dedication.

HTML, IT-Basic, Visual Basic, C++, Java, C, PHP, Ruby.

Of course there's small pieces of python, shell, more Javascript than I'd want to admit, and a couple of others.

But I first started writing HTML. This helps because it makes you think technically at multiple levels. First what you want to do (the goal), then the language needed (HTML), and why what you wrote (HTML) isn't what you want (the goal). Trial and error will get you into a program's mind.

Then I ended up using TI-Basic to program every math problem I would have to solve in high school into menu-based programs for tests.

Then I started writing VB programs (hangman, calculators) and even wrote a fully animated GDI game. It was slow, the VB code was absolutely terrible. Which moved me into C++ / DirectX for making games... etc.

So mainly, start with something small and consumable. Once you can eat that, hopping to the next, bigger problem seems smaller from where you are?

Best way is to pick a project. Any simple small project to begin with. And start implementing it.

Dont worry about anything (optimization and all stuff) as far as you are getting results.

If you are not able to find any Simple project, just try to implement a To-do list.

Get the very basics down - it will be fast and easy and you'll feel good you are making progress. HTML and CSS - don't get bogged down in HTML5 or any latest cutting edge thing or another. Just the core for now.

Once you've got this down, which really is pretty simple stuff, I'd go into jQuery and Javascript. Both are fairly easy to approach though deceptively so maybe, with a ton of upside; and with the push that NodeJS is making, that may be all the programming you need even for the backend.

I don't have any good rec's on learning HTML but google it, there's a ton out there.

CSS I'd do the same, though I also really like CSS - The Missing Manual by McFarland.

For Javascript you'll be hearing a lot of Javascript - The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford, a must read if you are serious.

And jQuery, honestly is so fun/powerful/addictive, if you get a big of Javascript down you will be off and running. There are countless tutorial websites on jQuery and more books coming everyday. Bookwise it's hard to rec right now as the new version of jQuery just dropped today and everything is a bit out of date as it stands.

Bottom line, don't get caught up in trying to learn too much to begin with. Also, good UI Coders are hard to come by and you can always find a Rails/Python/back-end guy to help out until you get that stuff down too.

SICP - _Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs_ by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman (http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/). Free online. Probably one of the best computer science books. It doesn't cover web programming, but if you know your programming fundamentals and theory well, you'll be in a good position to pick up whatever else comes along after current web programming techniques become unrecognizable. (The code is in Scheme, a Lisp dialect.) Do the exercises. Seriously - do the exercises. And yes, some of them are difficult.

PAIP - _Paradigms in Artificial Intelligence Programming - Case Studies in Common Lisp_ by Peter Norvig. This could very well have been three or four separate books. It has case studies of historical AI projects, chapters on learning / optimizing / implementing Lisp, chapters on search problems and logic programming, etc. Highly recommended, but I would wait on this one until you're proficient in at least two unrelated languages.

K&R - "Kernighan & Ritchie", aka. _The C Programming Language_. This is the book on learning C. Short, concise, informative. Your programming will benefit considerably by learning C (you'll be able to access low-level OS features, esp. on Unix, and it gives a good mental model for the lower-level stuff going on). If you like C and are comfortable with the exercises in K&R, then get _C Interfaces and Implementations_ by David Hanson - it covers practical library / API design, by way of a guided tour through several of the author's freely available libraries.

Also recommended:

_The Practice of Programming_ by Kernighan and Pike - Concise, practical advice about the programming skillset not specific to any one language: debugging techniques, how to write clean code, testing, rules of thumb for performance tuning, etc.

CTM, _Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming_ by Van Roy and Haridi (http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/book.html). This book is about the fundamental models different programming languages are based on, and how they complement each other. The writing is lucid and accessible, and covers many things (constraint programming, for example) that similar texts never get to.