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Originally Posted by headhawg
If you're new to programming, forget about C or C++. In fact, forget about object-oriented programming altogether if you have never coded before. Try learning something like BASIC first. It's been around forever, and the syntax is pretty straightforward. Liberty Basic has a demo version and there's also FreeBasic which is...um...free. Learn to program procedurally and work your way up to OOP. (If you're really adventurous you can use Visual Studio 2013 Express to learn Visual Basic .Net, but I think that might be too much of a challenge for n00bs. Microsoft Virtual Academy has a beginner course in VB .Net -- also free. You could watch the first couple of videos and take the assessments to see if you're ready for it.)
I only watched a few minutes of each, but unless you think that you could get into Stanford or MIT those are not the best videos for beginners imo. Beginners aren't going to do any bitwise functions, so I'm not sure why someone would need to know binary at a beginner level. I don't have something that I can recommend offhand, but anyone trying to write code should learn programming logic and how to create a flowchart. You could know every command/function in a programming language but if your logic is flawed and you can't get your program from point A to point B, what's the point of knowing that you can make a call to the Windows API?
And I'm not shooting down suggestions by traynor or DL. They are much better programmers than I am. But because of that I think that they may be overestimating the average person's coding ability.
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Good post. For me when we talk about getting complete novices off the ground with programming I think back to an old book like John Smiley's Learn To Program VB6, maybe there's something more current on the order of that. VBA and VB6 have a lot of common ground between them. I started with Basic on the VIC20 and Commodore64. Being just a young kid at the time I would've benefitted a great deal from formal instruction and never got it which didn't help matters, so I can see where others are coming from. On the other hand it's a different time, I have a hunch that it may be more efficient for the aspiring computer handicapper / researcher to choose software tools first like Excel / Access and learn hands on as never before by leveraging online resources, tutorials, forums etc. I guess the big question is what do people want to do, what type of output are they looking to get out of the software.
