Recently i have been getting questions: "how can i learn to program?", "How can i become a professional programmer?" Well i have rather than an answer, but a guideline. I can only show you the door, you will be the one to walk through it.
First things first, to go into this world you need to prepare your mind, be ready to learn, be ready to code at least bunch of hours a week, if you are not enthusiastic or curious about how things work, its time to start changing your mindset. Be ready to face problems that will literally turn your brain into a hyper multitasking machine, most of all be ready to see the world differently because this world you are stepping into, you haven't heard of anything like it before.
OK i didn't mean to scare you that way, fortunate for you, this days there are more easier ways to get exposed to the programming world, unlike years ago that we literally go through books and manuals in order to learn. A bunch of web applications are developed to guide you through the basics of programming in various languages, and i am going to talk about a few here.
Codecademy This site my favorite, why you ask? well because it has a comprehensive introduction to Python which happens to be my favorite language, aside that if you are interested in web development, there are courses for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby and each contains a project at the end to test if you actually learnt something. This site presents you with an interactive way of learning, using an online interpreter for various languages, you can follow instructions from each chapter, write the code in the editor instantly and test your code if it works. Also there are hints to somewhat "difficult" tasks in case you can't find your way. Also you gather points from actually completing modules, and they have something called streak, which is just a measurement of consecutive days you spent completing tasks. Additionally, after completing a language training, you can choose to start learning some API's like that of twitter, facebook e.t.c and guess what? its completely free.
Code School This web platform is similar to Codecademy in a way, with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby (Ruby on Rails). But it additionally have courses on Objective-C, iOS development, using version control systems (GIT), JQuery and a bunch of other API's. Though unlike Codecademy, some courses have charges.
Haskell If you are curious about functional programming languages, haskell is a place to start, this site gives a short introduction to haskell programming language interactively, giving you an overview of the concept and learning some basic syntax.
There are many other sites you can use to learn aside this one's, sites such as Cousera and Udacity where you can find full university course lectures in video with interactive course works and tasks, which you can do to test your knowledge and also certificates are awarded in some courses to those who satisfy the requirements of the courses.
Not being in school is not an excuse to not educate yourself, this is the 21st century, you can go to school online and self educate yourself at home.
