Ask HN: I want to learn how to code. Can anyone tell me how to start learning?

I am a recent college graduate (as of this past May) and I studied chemistry and physics. I have plans to go to graduate school within a year for theoretical and computational chemical physics - that's basically fancy talk for predicting physical interactions between molecules using high performance computing. I have some experience in the field from working as a research assistant as an undergrad and while I never had any problems with the physics, I struggled a little bit with the coding aspect because of lack of previous exposure.

I also read this post "To founders who can't code"

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1761530

It really hit home. I have had two failed ventures thus far which likely would have taken off better if I had the coding abilities to make my own demo. Instead I took the seed funding I received and hired people to do it for me - long story short things didn't work out; I lost money and disappointed people.

The author of the aforementioned post recommends that noncoder founders should: "Take 6 months off and go learn how to code (day and night, weekends including)." This is what I would like to do but I am unsure as to how to begin. Sure, there is a wealth of sources but I am unsure of which ones are quality sources and also what languages to learn first. I am not trying to be a coder or hacker overnight and my approach is methodical: I will devote 8-10 hours per week to learning. I generally pick up things fast; the key though, is having interesting problems to solve which increase in order of difficulty.

If anyone can give me a few pointers on how I can start learning (what resources are good, what language to begin with, a good program of studies) that would be much appreciated as it would help me develop my future ideas on my own and would probably also help with my research. I thought a cool initial project would be an applet which queries each line of a word document with book titles (I keep a running list of all the books I’ve read, one per line in a doc) and searches the net for a picture of a book cover and imports it into the app. Apologies for my ignorance but would this be a realistic project within 6 months?

Lastly, I did run a search on this but didn’t find any related threads; I apologize if this Q has come up before.

Thanks for your advice, AKD

When I was trying to decide what to learn I narrowed the search down by just heading to the book store and flipping through some books on various languages. Ultimately, I ended up with a choice between Ruby and Python. I couldn't tell what the major differences were, so I just decided to pick Ruby. I figured that there was no real way of recognizing the nuances of ANY language until I actually had one under my belt and could better understand what makes each one tick.

I'm fully aware that this was a somewhat cavalier method of choosing the pal I'd be spending the majority of my waking hours with, but I think that starting anywhere is better than stalling because you can't decide.

So far I'm satisfied with my choice. I think I would have been satisfied with Python too.

Python is easy to learn (not much syntax), easy to read (explicit vs implicit), has a big ecosystem (more packages/libraries), is taught at universities so it's easy to find good programmers to help, and is used by many large websites/companies so it's a good language to know.

Here are some of the best online Python tutorials, including a link to videos and course material for MIT's introductory computer science course, which uses Python: http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-learn-to-program-in-Python/an...

Build something that you want to use so it will be meaningful to you. Do you have a blog? That's usually a good first exercise. It's easy to do using Flask -- follow the tutorial (http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/).

Here are some tips to get you started:

Use Emacs as the text editor to write your code -- it usually comes pre-installed on Ubuntu, and it has a Python mode. Here are some Emacs tutorials (there are some good videos on YouTube too):

http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/manuals/usermanual/emac... http://www2.lib.uchicago.edu/keith/tcl-course/emacs-tutorial... http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/ http://cmgm.stanford.edu/classes/unix/emacs.html

Use PostgreSQL as your database. To install it on Ubuntu, use this command:

  $ sudo apt-get install postgresql

Here's a good SQL tutorial: http://philip.greenspun.com/sql/

When you build a blog, you don't have to worry about building a public authentication and comment system if you use something like Disqus (http://disqus.com/) -- you just include the Disqus JavaScript tag at the bottom of the blog's entry page.

Here are some good JavaScript tutorials: http://www.quora.com/What-are-good-books-preferably-found-on...

Use StackOverflow to ask programming questions: http://stackoverflow.com/

UPDATE: Here are links to some commonly-used scientific Python packages (http://www.drewconway.com/zia/?p=204).

plug: It's the tack that I took when writing Quick and Easy Python (http://manning.com/briggs/) - small bits, building on each other.