Programming can be overwhealing at first. The first time you try it can maybe take you a month or more to understand. However once you learn a language, programming in another language can take you as little as a week to get the hang of it. Don't get me wrong, mastering a language can take years, but getting the hang of it doesn't take much. * First choose the language you want to start learning. Most people chose C++ because it's one of the most popular languages out there and there are a lot of resources. * Then I would BUY a begginers book about that language. Yes, BUY one. Something like Beginning Programing with C++ for dummies. You can download the kindle software (free) for your computer and buy the book on Amazon for about $18.00, or you could find it elsewhere (if you know what I mean). The reason I would get a book rather than getting online free tutorials is that many of the people that write the tutorials for free, although they may be excellent programmers, have no clue on how to teach some one who has no experience, and sometimes they assume something you may not know is so obvious that they don't explain it and is really frustrating. Books, on the other hand have been reviewed by many people and are your best bet to lean fast. The for dummies line is excellent, because they assume nothing and explain everything in great detail to the point you get frustrated about reading the same thing over and over again and you just want to yell: I KNOW!! YOU REPEAT THAT ON EVERY F..ING PAGE!!, but that's better than yelling: WHAT DO YOU MEAN COMPILE??? WHAT IS THAT?? F.. THIS S...T I'M CHANGING MY CARREER TO ART. * Finally, have someone you can ask for guidance either in person or on chat. Don't ask him/her to debug your code every 5 minutes. This will annoy your friend and create a dependency, but get someone to help you if you are really really stuck on a problem. I personally started with JavaScript, because there is no compiler needed. All you need is a text editor (notepad) and a web browser. It is an excellent language to start and is very similar to C++ and Java (do not confuse JavaScript with Java, they are NOT the same), so you can transition easily between them. But back when I started there weren't as many resources as there are today and I didn't even have some one who know programming to guide me and after so much frustration I think of myself as a good programmer, so if you are determined, you have a good chance to learn and be very good at it. Final thought: There is so much frustration when you start programming on your own. Some times you see your code and think: "THIS IS CORRECT, WHY YOU NO WORK!!" and after an hour of frustration you find out it was something stupid like you missed a dot, or a comma or a quote symbol, etc. But every beggining programmer went throu that, because you need to get that native intuition that comes only after much much practice. So when you are at that point, don't get demotivated, take a break, chill and come back to your problem, read some more and attack it. When you find the stupid mistake and fix your program, you will feel like you own the world. After a few weeks you'll find yourself debugging your programs quicker, because you'll notice what are your more common mistakes. It is what is call debugging and you will have to do it even if you are an expert programmer and it is what makes programming so much fun. I personally enjoy debugging other people code maybe even more than programming, because others give up so quickly and after a few hours of debugging, when I finally find their mistake I'm like "IN YOUR FACE!." It's really fun :)