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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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That is exactly the point of computer science--programming logic, rather than nitpicky details of one language over another. It is precisely the basic details that are needed to understand that programming logic. An example: the "garbage" content of a memory area that can be returned if a variable is not initialized. Understanding the "why" makes the "how" really simple.
Both the Harvard and Stanford courses linked are intended as intro-level classes for non-computer science majors. Most colleges require a basic course in computers for most (if not all) students in the first semester/year. Malan's CS50 class had 750 students onsite, and something like 80,000 online through EdX. For good reason.
I agree 100% about learning BASIC or VBA, and 110% that Visual Basic in the (free) Visual Studio 2013 is the way to go for a novice.
