It seem like every month someone new asks this question. THen a whole bunch of people reply with all their various tips and wisdom. Here's how you learn to code. You have a few options available to you.

1) You take a class. HS or college.

2) You buy a book and learn on your own.

If you are too cheap to buy a book there are lots of free "tutorials" on the web. Trust me when I tell you that you will be much better off with buying a book. Take your book, go page by page through it working every single problem. Rewrite every examply program they provide and do every practice problem at the end of the chapters. By the end of the book you'll have a solid grasp of what ever language it is you wish to learn. To actually get reaally good at coding you have to play around with it. Spend hours upon hours in front of your computer trying out new stuff. You -WILL NOT- learn how to code in a week.

Of all the languages I prefer JAVA. Even though it may take some extra lines of code to get the simplest of things done, the structure is the easiest to understand. It is also widely used throughout the business world and on the web. Although if you're wanting to learn for muds, you should try either C or C++. C++ compiliers all still run C just so you know. So anything you write in C can be run by any program that wants C++ (as a general rule anyway).

I think something worth mentioning is that to get started, you don't necessarily need tutorials and such.

If you have a basic knowledge of C/C++ (or some derivative of C), then you can start to learn. Get yourself a copy of some source code, and start working with it. I'm still a beginning coder really, but I learned by getting myself some background in C/C++ and then starting to tinker with a copy of the code for the MUD I'm an Imm at.

Granted, it would go faster if our Head Coder was around more to ask questions of...but I've made some pretty big strides just myself.

Cheers,
-Luthien
tsos.rarcoa.com

You may want to head to the official site for that 'Thinking in C++' link posted above - it's a bit more up to date, and you can download the whole thing to your local hard drive and view it from there...

I have Beginning Programming for Dummies and C++ for Dummies. So far I'm doing good.  

Try your local library,too. No need to buy a book you can get for free. (Unless you are me and rack up on late fees)

I agree with everything that has been mentioned to this point...unless you only learn one way efficiently, that being hands on.  Most coders I know of are analytical, and over-analyse things to death which poses a bit of a problem when they take a simple function, and add 10x too many lines, then optimize it in assembly or something of the sort.  

As was mentioned above, I would recommend a download of the e-book, TICPP ver.2 - nice start to C++,  - if you get lost, you can bookmark sections in the .pdf for easy searching and recovery of the information you want without having to page/scroll/click 200 times. I learned to code by opening up the files, one by one and examining how they are pieced together, it gives a basic structure to work with.  Another thing that I didn't see mentioned in this, especially for old and newbie coders alike.. the use of GDB - it's a debugger that'll allow you to monitor changes as the code is running so you can see what's going goofy where, and help pinpoint the issue - most look at the code they added and say "it crashed, but where and why?" where with , you can force commands into it, and it'll give detailed output of anything you tell it to give you - quite the handy tool when you're paging through 500 lines of newly added stuff, and it compiles without a single warning whatsoever but still dumps.  My suggestion is to start with a compiler on your computer, and tinker with the basics there while going through the TICPP book - the book is free to d/l, and if you're running windows I would recommend , falls under GPL(free == good), has all the goodies, and always new packages to add for further functionality - it handles C and C++ quite nicely.  It also runs on any Windows OS, 95-XP, so if you are diehard Windows 95 due to stability reasons, it'll still work without any issues.  I really cannot thing of anything else to throw into it at this time, and I hope this bit of information helps some.

  Zaroth-

One thing you may notice from the posts above. Coding and learning to code takes a very large amount of time. You will fail, but you need to get up and keep going with it to achieve a good understanding.

Good luck.

Leigh
CTO

A rule of thumb I use here in university is the easier a language is to program in, the less efficient it is, so it's kind of a trade off between time to learn a language and time to make money to pay for the extra resources.

If I haven't emphasized it, I'm going to now.

Patience is absolutely essential.